Random Thoughts and a few Snapshots

As I take a break between video conferences I thought I'd post a quick blog.

This is a shot of downtown Graham, NC looking north. The building centrally located in our traffic circle is the historic Alamance County Court House. The arrow and yellow circle designate the building in which our office is located. We lease space in The Cooperative.

Karen continues to co-lead the Wednesday morning Ladies' Bible Study at church with Sandra. Sandra and Karen are seated back by the TV screen.

Tucker's still up and around, slower, but still a steady mover. Here she's enjoying a "spa day." Or rather, resting and drying out from a personal bath by Karen, her private pamper person.

And we still have our backyard birds. In this case, an Eastern Blue Bird.

Red Bellied Woodpecker

Northern Cardinal

Brown Headed Nuthatch

Thanks for stopping by! You know where to find us!

Christmas in Congo: Jesse Mitchell

Here's a slice of life from Jesse Mitchell, one of the ten GOM missionaries Karen and I helped orient and train back back in August 2017. We spent the next year coaching Jesse through fund raising and he's now been in the Republic of Congo for five months. Jesse serves as part of our non-medical staff at Pioneer Christian Hospital (PCH). PCH is our hospital in the village of Impfondo.

Jesse Mitchell, Republic of Congo

Jesse is a trained chef working to develop a feeding program to help our patients heal faster, start a sustainable gardening project to supplement the local food varieties, and assist at our partner ministry, Kimia Leprosy Center just down the trail.

From Jesse:
"This has been a crazy holiday season here in Congo...which is perfectly normal for here, I guess. The children at the hospital church put on a brilliant Christmas Nativity play. Mary and Joseph finding nowhere else to stay, ended up in a little palm-thatched hut all lit up with Christmas lights and tinsel, nestled in a small grove of banana trees.

Joseph and Mary and the birthplace of Jesus.

The shepherds and their sheep.

"Angels jumped out of the grove screaming, 'DO. NOT. BE. AFRAID!' As shepherds and sheep (choir boys with ears on) fell to the ground shouting and bleating in terror, respectively. Then the Wise Men came down the isle following the star (a little blinking bicycle light on a pulley). It was perfect.

The Wise Men following the star.

"When the Angel warned Joseph and Mary to not go back to Nazareth, King Herod became furious and sent his terrifying Masked Gunmen to kill baby Jesus. As they searched the church for Jesus, terrifying the little kids, the Angel ushered Joseph and Mary out the side door and on their way to Egypt seconds before the masked gunmen found the hut and blasted away at it with their beeping, sonic laser guns."

Stay tuned for more slices of life from Jesse. 

It's our tremendous pleasure to share how God is working through your partnership to send and sustain GOM's missionaries all over the world.

Talking With The Future

Each fall, Karen and I travel to Louisville, Kentucky to represent our mission at the Global Missions Health Conference (GMHC). GMHC is the largest conference in the United States focused on medical missions. Over 150 agencies, vendors, and service providers participated in this year's conference, November 8-10. The conference is an intense time of personal interaction, relational development, networking, recruiting, and mobilization with medical professionals, and future medical professionals, interested in mission service.

Our Team: Rachel, Karen, Me, and Greg

This year our team consisted of Rachel, Recruiting Administrator; Karen, Partnership Resource Manager; me, Director of Partnership Development; and Greg, VP of Personnel. Over the course of the conference we made over 100 solid connections with individuals, couples, and families interested in learning more about joining Global Outreach Mission in revealing Christ to the world.

Greg

Rachel

Karen

Greg shares one of our ministry brochures.

Karen leads a tour of Pioneer Christian Hospital, our medical facility in the Republic of Congo, using our touch-screen kiosk.

Thank your for joining us at the conference through your prayerful and financial partnership!

To Africa With Love

You may remember my May 17 blog about making dresses for "Dress A Girl Around the World." I'm excited to share that girls in the village of Msholozi, South Africa are now wearing those dresses!

Holgar & Maria, friends of ours from Germany who serve in South Africa, connected with us prior to their recent visit to the US. When Maria learned that my friend Cindy and I had sewn the dresses, Maria shared that she worked in a camp with a group of girls that desperately needed new dresses! And to have dresses sewn by hand specifically for them and sent with Christ's love would be even more special to the girls. While Cindy and I had made 13 dresses, Maria said she needed 31!

Keith's Mom in California financed the project so I had everything needed to keep sewing. Our friends Chris and Kathy from Ohio were vacationing on the Outer Banks, heard about the dresses, and offered to stop on their way home and take them back to Coshocton. Holgar & Maria would stop in Coshocton, pack the dresses, and hand-carry them to South Africa, and the girls in the camp.

Chris & Kathy stop in Graham to pick up the dresses.

Maria delivered and distributed the dresses to her girls. Here are photos of some of the girls in their dresses. Thanks for sharing these, Maria! The smiles on the girls' faces makes my heart glad!

Here we are with the first of the dresses back in May.

Gods hands worked in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, California, Ohio, Germany, and South Africa to create and deliver these dresses to bless girls in a tiny camp in a small village. Faith relationships going back 20 years...bearing fruit in ways unimagined. Can dresses have eternal impact? Maybe not the fabric itself, but the hands and hearts that sewed, drove, stored, packed, traveled, and delivered the dresses...just might. 

Thanks for being part of this Kingdom Adventure through your gifts and your prayers!

If you'd like to have your hands and heart involved in projects like these...you don't have to be able to sew, leave your home, OR know girls in Africa!

Just CLICK HERE!