Terry and I hope everyone had a great Christmas and enjoyed the holidays. We did.
Over the last year or so, we’ve learned more about Terry’s health and what the future looks like. We had thought they were going to give her injections to boost her immune system but they have decided to let her body recover on its own. One of the many things she can’t do now is be in a larger group of people where we aren’t in “control.” Doctors have pointed out that church is one of those places. If you’re shopping, you can control what goes on around you and who you are around. In church, it’s hard to do that…so we do our Sundays at home watching our three favorite “TV preachers,” and studying.
Recently one of them opened his show reading the first several verses of Nehemiah. He then explained that Nehemiah was a person who was more than likely never in Jerusalem, but wanted to know about those returning there and the city. When told the walls had been broken down and burned, verse 1:4 says he sat down and cried:
1The words of Nehemiah son of Hakaliah: In the month of Kislev in the twentieth year, while I was in the citadel of Susa,2 Hanani, one of my brothers, came from Judah with some other men, and I questioned them about the Jewish remnant that had survived the exile, and also about Jerusalem.
3 They said to me, “Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned with fire.”
4 When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven.
Then the speaker asked the question, “What breaks your heart?” There are many things we could point at and to, considering our world today and all that is going on in it. But Terry and I agreed that the same things that broke our hearts in 1994 still do today — those in Haiti who still live in complete poverty; those who still hang on to the voodoo belief and reject the God we know because He is so distant; the constant political turmoil Haiti goes through and is going through at this very minute.
Through the years we, together, have made a very big difference in the lives of so many people and in some cases changed the world they live in, but there is still so much more we could do. There is more we have to do. Going into this in 1994 we obviously had no idea what would take place or where it would take us. This was a point the speaker made — “You have no idea what hangs in the balance of your decision to embrace the burden God has put in your heart”.
Our burden in 2016 is still doing all we can to help our friends in Haiti. It is our prayer that you to will embrace that burden.
Thank you for all you did in 2015 for them and for all you did for us as well. We pray the New Year will be very good to all of you.
Serving HIM together,
Steve and Terry
