Monday, December 26, 2005

Christmas with The Boys

It sure was good to celebrate Christmas with family this year. The whole day Regina and I thought and prayed for our friends in Cuba. Tyler and Jordan especially enjoyed the festivities with their "Big Daddy" and "Big Mama" and services Christmas day and night were just wonderful. It really has been good to be in our home church here in Lubbock celebrating the birth of our Savior and I have had the opportunity to speak several times. Two weeks ago I challenged about 150 children and teenagers and two were saved. Incredibly I met one teenager who came to church in a Frenship (my high school almamater) letter jacket (it looked just like mine). Bro. Ivey told me to pray for him and I thought it would be good to share that here - his name is Ryan and he has alot of potential and even though I met him briefly he reminded me a lot of a few young men I have had the honor and privilege of training in the past. We wish you and yours a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Friday, December 09, 2005

From Pencil to Digital

Tyler, Jordan and myself are trying to recover from the "Black Plague of Death" this week here in Lubbock while Regina has managed to stay healthy. Regina told us that it must be those pre-natal vitamins her Doctor has her on that spared her the plague and that we all should start taking them. SMILE I'm afraid that the boys and I are rather convinced that those are for new mommies and we should stick to our Freddy Flinstones. LOL We are looking forward to being at our home church for the first time in four years this Sunday and are currently working on getting out Christmas packets to our churches. The boys have been stuck inside and have been helping us out a lot. The packets are filled with DVD's, Christmas cards and new literature on the Dominican Republic - our re-vamped logo is once again on just about everything. This logo believe it or not started out rather simply - Regina and I were at my father-n-law's camp in San Jose, Costa Rica in 1999 brainstorming with Pastor Jose Arnaldo (currently a associate at Kelview Heights in Midland and President of the Hispanic BBF here in the States) on some logo ideas and Regina and Jose drew up several in less than a hour. After camp Luis Roverssi (he does our web page) told us it would be a good idea if we had some sort of logo for our ministry in Cuba and we took out those ideas and picked this one. We ran it by Bro. Barnes who spoofed it up a bit (he is rather artistic) and Luis and Regina went down to MGI Graphics in San Jose and worked together with them on light boards to turn this idea into a color illustrator document so that we could use it across many different platforms. Currently in its compressed JPEG form we have integrated this into our webpage (Dreamweaver), video (FLASH), professional print jobs (Photoshop) and several other medias and it all started as a simple pencil drawing at a Christian camp in Central America.

Friday, December 02, 2005

Novembers Interactive Missionary Letter

The Family at the Nobska Lighthouse in Cap Cod, MA HAPPY HOLIDAYS II Thessalonians 1:3 - We are bound to thank God always for you, brethren, as it is meet, because that your faith groweth exceedingly, and the charity of every one of you all toward each other aboundeth; We started off this year in the valley and "we are bound to thank God always for you" that we are ending on top of the mountain. Regina and I will have fully recovered financially from losing everything to “Hurricane Fidel” in January and have been able to replace many of the items (Bibles, Transportation, Tools, Books to name a few) that are vital for the church we are starting in Santiago, D.R. We have also been very encouraged to see "that your faith groweth exceedingly". In every conference (10+) that we have been in since returning to the U.S. in late August - faith promise has INCREASED. What a blessing!! In addition, many have been saved (8 in one conference), baptized and in several churches young and old alike have surrendered to serve Him full-time - WOW. We also are happy to report "that the charity of everyone of you all toward each other aboundeth" - the Battlefield Baptist church unexpectedly gave us 10,000$ to start a mobile MANNA feeding center in the D.R. - this will be MANNA’s first center there - WOW. Finally, our travels have taken us from TX, to KS, to MA to FL and everywhere in between over the last 3 months and we have been encouraged by Gracia Burnham, Adel Castro (Fidels nephew), Dr. Chuck Lynch, FBI counter intelligence officials, New Tribes representatives and many more. MERRY CHRISTMAS to all!! FYI DR4Christ is loaded with brand new material on the D.R. and includes up to date prayer requests, needs and more. In addition to this you can download videos, photos for your Missions conferences and most importantly you can enroll for our quarterly HTML e-mails at www.DR4Christ.com/enroll - Hurry because the first newly designed HTML is headed your way in January. Tyler and Jordan in Arlington with Hallmark Baptist

Hey, Hey, Hey

The D.R., is just a hop, skip and a jump from our old home and our survey trip in June was FANTASTIC! We were able to spend time with both BBFI missionaries, the Lanes and the Kents. Both couples were very helpful in showing us around and we really appreciated the time they spent with us. After doing some investigating we discovered the tremendous need for more Baptist Churches. If you draw a line down the middle from east to west, there are less than 5 Baptist Churches in the northern part of the island. In the center of this northern part lye’s a city that is on our heart called Santiago. Santiago not only has over 1 million people but has several neighboring towns with no churches at all. There is a great window of opportunity here and we hope you come visit one day.

Without Further Ado

Today begins a bold new world for us - blogging. Hold on to your hats!! Here at DR4Christ.BlogSpot you will find selected tidbits through out the week from Regina (my better half), our friends and I on the D.R. For those who don't know it yet - in March the Lord called us to the Dominican. The Dominican Republic (forever now known has the D.R.) is on the island Hispaniola right next to Cuba. It shares the island with the nation of Haiti and I guess you could say it is next to a ROCK (Cuba) and a HARD PLACE (Haiti). SMILE According to the Joshua project - www.joshuaproject.net (just a source – nothing more) the Dominican has a population of roughly 9 million and is 7.60% evangelized (that is pretty low). We hope that this medium will be used to better communicate our passion/vision for the D.R. and please feel free to read, interact, discuss and just plain be yourself - thanks for tuning in.