Camping and Growing

The interns and the discipleship team went camping in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma this weekend. Two staff families came as well. It was a great time to explore the great outdoors, see the milky way and watch the stars (we can't see real stars in our area of Dallas), and get to know each other better. My personal stories included:

• getting lost for an hour in the wildlife preserve (and taking pictures of the buffalo)
• being unable to find the big dipper (since I hadn't seen it in so long)
• getting up to watch a sunset that never happened (and having really good conversations while waiting for it)
• and being challenged by DB - one of the staff members that shared Sunday morning with us. One of the things he mentioned was when we pray for God to remove a temptation and it doesn't go away...sometimes because we honestly don't want the temptation to go away. And he spoke of our need to stop focusing on the temptation and fall more in love with the Lord.

Please pray for me this week: that I would love the Lord and each of the people around me enough to do what is best and right...even when it hurts. Pray for wisdom and discernment.

Dalits and McCreery

Three years ago, the girls of McCreery 1st West at Sterling College spent several weeks praying for the Dalit people of Asia to come to know Christ. Even though we didn't hear of immediate results, the results of many people's prayers can be seen in the figures from a recent government census. India reports that some 20 million Dalits have become Christians. You can read about the Dalit's latest prayer need at the gfa.org website as their case for religious freedom goes before the India Supreme Court.

I was privileged to visit with a few of those legendary 1st West ladies this weekend as I made a trip up to Kansas. Thank you for all your prayers! The Lord answered them in amazing ways. Saturday was full-- conversing with college friends and professors, gathering prayer requests, playing Ultimate Frisbee on Campbell Lawn, watching the homecoming musical. Several friends said they would pray about becoming part of my financial support team and I was so grateful they would consider praying about it. God gave much grace as I shared with the Korean Pres. Church on Sunday and they are continuing to be an active part of my support team. Sunday evening I fellowshipped with my family, my grandparents, and my home church. Monday saw me leaving the house at 4AM to return to Dallas for a full day of work. And so I went, rejoicing in the Lord.

Your prayers are a blessing.

Hot Showers Tomorrow

Praise God for our new hot water heater! The plummer and landlord just left and we should have hot water tomorrow morning. And then we can wash the dishes, wash our clothes, and take hot showers! Hurrah!

I'm preparing for a weekend trip up to Sterling and Wichita--hopefully I'll see a few college friends at homecoming and then visit the Wichita Korean Presbyterian Church on Sunday morning. I may check in with a church in Coldwater to see if they would interested in hearing a story or two about my India trip on Sunday evening. Please pray that all the details work out and the Lord will work through this trip.

My interesting day...

4:45am - Woke up early. Unable to return to sleep. Noticed strange gurgling noise in bathroom. Remembered hearing it late the night before. Decided it was normal house noises. Read in Psalms 113-117...
6:05am - Started running water to shower and shave.
6:15am - Shower water never got hot. Decided not to shave. Finished washing hair in cold shower.
6:25am - Checked hot water heater. Found water pouring down the sides. Uh-oh.
6:30am - Call GFA Maintenance guy.
6:35am - Turned off pilot light. Went outside and realized the release valve for the water heater was running water out of the house at about 6 gallons a minute.
6:40am - Called Mom. Shut off water to water heater.
7:00am - Called landlord.
7:05am - GFA Maintenance guy arrives. We use the garden hose to drain the water from the hot water heater into the bathtub.
7:35am - Walk out the door for work. Realize I forgot to take the trash out for trash day. Dashed through the garage with the trash and found water running into the garage through the ceiling. Oops.
7:45am - Drop SG off for dentist appointment.
8:00am - Called the landlords again.
9:00am - Setup computer for 1pm training - make sure it works ahead of time.
9:05am - Realized there is a meeting starting in the room where I'm setting up the computer. Oops.
10:30am - Move 1pm training to 11am.
10:40am - Donor database stops working properly. Helpdesk flooded with calls.
10:50am - Realize the ONE THING I didn't test this morning for the training doesn't work.
11:15am - Move 11am training back to 1pm.
11:25am - Found problem in test. Brand new phone cable was bad.
12:15 - lunch.
1:00pm - Have 1pm training. Spend rest of afternoon quietly working on helpdesk tickets.
5:00pm - Leave for supper and to get SG's prescription.
5:30pm - Prescription left at COSTCO. Headed for Sonic.
5:45pm - 4 miles later, Sonic wasn't where I thought it was. Oops.
6:00pm - Return to COSTCO and eat. Get prescription. Get phone call from landlord--no hot water until tomorrow!
6:27pm - At office, set up laptops for prayer meeting.
6:35pm - Test Bro. KP's power point to make sure it works.
6:40pm - Show TC how to work remote control for laptop.
6:45pm - Laptop #1 dies. Run upstairs and get laptop #3.
7:00pm - Prayer starts. Laptops working.
7:35pm - Bro. KP starts showing pictures from his recent trip.
7:42pm - Bro. KP's power point stops working on the computer. Three IT people try frantically to figure out the problem.
7:44pm - Power point starts showing on laptop #2.
7:45pm - Remote control for laptop stops working. Starts again after being reset.
9:00pm - Finish prayer meeting. Pack up laptops.
9:10pm - Get to IT with two laptops only to realize I left my keys downstairs. Thankfully I'm rescued by a passing knight.

The rest of my evening was fairly quiet - home, prayed for SG's mom in the hospital, got a quick shoulder rub from ML, toted the garden hose from the bathtub to the back yard, went grocery shopping. Got chocolate milk on sale.

I don't think I'll be disappointed if tomorrow is slightly less exciting.

Another piece of chocolate

Someone left a verse at my desk yesterday. I read it and thought, "Oh, that's nice. But I already knew that verse."

This morning I thought, "WAIT! If someone gave you a piece of chocolate, would you say, 'Oh, that's nice, but I've already know what chocolate tastes like.'?"

I don't think so.

Seeking God

Thanks for all your prayers. We've got the training and operator implementation all ready for tomorrow. Things are going well for that. We were able to borrow a vacuum last night to keep the house clean as we seek God's provision. (The first vacuum we borrowed last night busted a belt in the first ten minutes. So we had to go borrow a second vacuum. It worked.)

I'm trying to spend more time in the Word this week - you can pray that I would be consistent in doing that and that the Holy Spirit would open my eyes to it's truth. Also pray - I want to be able to have relationships with the people around me where I can confront and encourage them and they can confront and encourage me. That takes time, prayer, and sacrifice.

In Asia - tribal warfare is killing dozens in northeast India. You can read about the lastest happenings here in the Hindu Times. I've heard numbers of tens of thousands of people left homeless so far.

Operators and Vacuums

Well, one of the projects at the office that helped keep me busy yesterday and today was arranging setup and training for new phone operators. Some of our interns will be working as operators taking incoming calls while continuing to work on their projects at the desks. This will allow the current full time staff who are acting as backup operators to focus more on their jobs. Two of our current backup operators are also department coordinators -- they'll be glad for the extra help! So we're planning the training and software install and implementation...

Personal Prayer Request: The Lord provided us with a vacuum just over a year ago. It died about three weeks ago and I found out it will cost almost more to fix it than we originally paid for it. I'm not sure I'd like to do that. Could you join us in prayer that the Lord will provide us with another (working) vacuum or with the funds to buy a (long-lasting) quality new one?

I praise God for you!

Earthquake in Pakistan

I know this post is late, but please be praying for GFA's Bible College in the Indian state of Jammu andKashmir. I'm sure that you have all been praying for the earthquake there at the border of Pakistan and India. We've been praying and interceeding as well. Our Bible College was structurally damaged and several of the students had minor injuries. They are praying right now for safety and opportunities to go into the devastated areas.

Reports in the news media indicate that many of the relief teams getting anywhere close to the hardest hit areas are mobbed and their stuff taken before they can ever set up to work effectively.

You can see the initial GFA story at http://www.gfa.org/gfa/newsupdate100805 and you can check back at the main www.gfa.org site for updated information.

THANK YOU for praying for me while I was at the web conference! I could tell when people started praying and I started understanding things...slowly. Pray that I will now have wisdom and discipline to put it into practice.

Branching in time

My class in versioning has paused for a discussion of branching, time, and commitment. Not the definitions that you're thinking of. It's a matter of if you have a tag and you commit the changes and then you decide you want to rollback to the old version and still keep the temporary version to work on more for the next version. JT says you can't play with time that way. A matter of physics or something.

I continue to try to plan out how we can use what we're learning here to improve the gfa.org website and our GFA intranet to improve information and productivity for our prayer supporters and for our staff. Walking each step in life to the glory of God.

WebGUI conference

I arrived in Las Vegas Tuesday night for a conference on WebGUI - the content management system we use for the designing and updating the www.gfa.org website and the intranet (internal website) that I'm setting up for GFA staff.

I'm immersed in conversations about cascading style sheets and asset managers and this session coming up will be covering templating language. I think it could be translated into "making a web page look the way you want it to look."

Some of you are thinking, "Wow! She knows so much!" Well, I really don't. Most of this is greek (or "geek greek," as one person described it) to me. And sometimes I would like to go AHHHH and leave this for someone else to do. But, I continually remind myself, if I can help our home staff be better equipped and able to find the information they need in the home office, they can more effectively help our staff on the field.

Pray for quick understanding!

Pubs, music, and gospel tracts

Yes, it is really 3:15AM right now. I just walked in the door of my house after an evening of witnessing. We didn't end up going to the State Fair for witnessing, but instead to Sundance Square in Ft. Worth. We arrived about eight in the evening as the nightlife was heading into full swing. We spent about two hours in the Square, took an hour and a half for prayer and sharing, and then returned to the square for another two hours.

Definitely an experience. We left tracts on tables and handed out tracts to people walking by, but we focused more on simply conversing with the people we met.

Just a few...three runners getting ready for a Cancer Run. They wanted to know if I was blogging this. They were Christians, but not living their faith. Two upper teens, Stephanie and Roxanne--I shared the gospel with them and they were really affected by it. Pray that God will speak to their hearts and send other Christians into their lives. Jared--he was drunk and probably won't remember anything I said in the morning. I gave him a gospel tract to put in his pocket. Elaine--a twenty-something who had just left Catholicism to attend a local Protestant Church. I was able to encourage her in her walk with the Lord and able to witness to her family. Brook and her brother Dwight--friendly people who wanted me to come party with them next weekend. Their cell phone started ringing everytime I started talking about repentance. Dwight asked me to call Brook--he said it could really make a difference in her life. Pray that the Lord will work in both of their lives.

I left the evening glad we had gone to Sundance Square and challenged to reach out more to the people I meet in my area. Unlike Kansas, many people around here have never heard the Gospel message. But I also left with the renewed conviction that God is calling me to serve at GFA first and foremost.

G'morning.