Pray BFF #61                                  July 31, 2004

Broad Side Attack!

It is obvious that the evil one has ‘hit’ us these last two weeks. How do we know?

Elizabeth was driving with Rebekah (in the back) when an older man plowed into the side of our car and totaled it. Thankfully, he was insured. We see God's grace in the way He protected our daughters. We are trusting Him to help us acquire another reliable car.

Paul came home last night from a great church prayer meeting to find his computer completely blank. The phone tech said that she never ‘saw’ anything like this. Seems like 99% chance of not recovering any data. We see God's sovereignty not only by having the repairs fully covered, but also that God prodded Paul to make backups last weekend. Now if he had been fully obedient, his mail and mail program would have been backed up too! Paul will spend a few hours trying to get things going on his laptop.

In additions to these chief concerns Satan threw in a handful of favorite distractions like a broken vacuum, a malfunctioning keyboard, bad LCD connector, a broken blender and a dying office phone.

The evil one can take circumstances only so far, but it is always under the sovereign hand of our good God. We do need to trust Him through it all. In any case, we give thanks for considering us worthy of these trials. He gives extra grace. For example, most repairs are not costing money but time. As for time, this is one of the only few weekends that Paul does not need to speak and use the computer. The enemy is trying to work against us, but the Lord is strengthening us for upcoming trip to India.

Thank you for your prayers! We need them!

"Feed My sheep"

Pastor Stephen in India sent us his local budget which came to around $1800 for each of the four cities. The pastor is setting it up a 3 day retreat for 150 pastors (rented pillows included). I was thinking that the pastors would travel back and forth each day. In any case, we need to see what the Lord wants.

As Paul was praying for this, God's Word was very clear, “Feed My sheep.” If any of you have a burden to help in this, let us know. We are not sure how much the people there can raise enough through their efforts since they are in such a poverty-stricken area.

Goal Accomplished!

In the midst of trials, there are encouragements. Our goal for this year’s webpages read has just been realized. We have been praying that God would give us 2,000 pageviews a day. On July 30th, we reached 60,204 for the month! We have noticed an increase in overseas readership. We have now set our hearts to pray for 2,500 daily web page views from 1,000 people by the year’s end.

Download the full scoop on Paul's India trip:
ftp://foundationsforfreedom.net/pub/India_Training2004.pdf