We had a phone call this morning from someone we haven't heard from in ten years. More exciting than that is that they've advocated for us at their local church, a church we've also not heard from in ten years. Their church is looking more closely at the missionaries they support and doing a little bit of renovation. (It is easy for churches to collect a lot of prayer letters and missionary prayer cards and do very little about them.) This contact of ours has stood up and basically re-introduced us to the leadership of the church, using only the literature we've put out.
The thing that stood out as our biggest "selling point" - that we communicate regularly with our supporters. When a church is looking at choosing who to support, they usually have several criteria, that can include; members of our church or members of our denomination, doing work that agrees with our values as a church AND communicates regularly.
It is confirmation again that when I put effort, at the end of every month, into writing our news/prayer letter, it is worth it!
It is also a case in point that we cannot easily put value on what we do each week. In this case, we visited the church ten years ago, but didn't have a response from them and haven't heard from them since. It would be easy to assume that the Sunday we spent with them was valueless - yet, here, a decade later our work has born fruit.
But praise God for advocates. Without them we would only have individuals supporting us, not churches.
3 comments:
Pray the Lord for this provision. Sorry HA is wearing on you...it's not easy and feels so strange at times. Hope you can take time to rest and get refreshed too!
p.s. We saw your house (or soon to be your's) when we looked at some furniture for sale. We both agreed it is such a nice place, big and pretty bright. And SO nice to be SO close to school. It looks great!!
All we know is that they've invited us to speak again. But who knows!
BTW Susan thanks for your eye-witness account of the house. That encourages - it is not easy to make a decision about a house at a distance, as you well know!
Thank you for sharing this example as encouragement, that we never really know when or where the seeds we have planted will bear fruit. Sharing Footprints with others can be a bit like this, sometimes when a new issue comes out I will hear *nothing* but then a year or two down the track, somebody will tell me how much a particular article meant to them ... always gives me a boost and a renewed enthusiasm for this task God has entrusted to me :-)
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