Janey and I are very pleased with Benjamin's progress in school. He has completed 4th grade and we have purchased his 5th grade curriculum. This fall he will be adding to his regular instruction beginning violin. A home school orchestra is starting up in September and Benjamin is very excited about playing. Along with the music lessons, he will be able to make new friends which he is very interested in doing. He usually is a social butterfly. What is interesting is that Benjamin loves classical music and doesn't care for any of the contemporary style. When he visits his grandma Erwin, they listen to classical music and it has had a very positive influence on him. Bennie dreams of one day being a conductor of an orchastra; I don't think he understands the extreme complexities of being a conductor but we will let him dream and save the complications for later.
Janey continues to serve our ministry by working at Costco where she is able to get our health insurance as well as enable us to pay our bills and get out of debt. We took a big hit on selling our house in Dallas several years ago and we are still trying to get out from under the money we lost. When I joined Serve India Ministries, I took a 50% pay cut from the ministry I worked at before which was subsidizing my salary along with what support I raised. Now that I am with Serve India Ministries, we are having tremendous success reaching thousands of unreached villages but I have to raise every penny of my support. Continue to pray for us as we trust God to be debt free and more able to serve un-hindered. Our dream one day would be that we could raise our support level to a point that Janey would not have to work and we could still get health insurance.
Ministries will always come and go and God's work will be done God's way in God's time but he only gives us one family and I want to make sure that I take care of them. My pastor from Arkansas, Pastor Tim Phillips always admonished me to "take care of your family!" Don't neglect them for the sake of ministry or your will loose both.
We will be traveling to TX for a couple of days next week to greet the Teen Mania team; we want to give them t-shirts to commemorate their mission trip as well as lots of information about Serve India. It would be nice to see many of these young people continue their love for India by supporting a pastor or some children and best of all, becoming a staff member or volunteer for us!
Later in August, our family will have the wonderful honor of traveling to Minneapolis and visiting with John Piper's ministry. John Piper is one of the most inspiring teachers of today and is a real strong advocate of world missions and fulfilling the great commission. Pray that somehow we might be able to build a strong partnership and this church might help reach thousands of villages in India through supporting many pastors. After the meeting with John Piper, I will be speaking at a church and then we hope to stop and drop some materials off at BILD International www.bild.org ; our partner that has developed the curriculum our pastors use. We are now the process of translating the 1st 4 books in 8 different languages. This will be 32 booklets that need to be translated and then printed for pastors all over India to use.
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