Answers to Prayer and Fun at the Beach in Winter

Every day we praise God for what he is doing!  There are so many things to be thankful for: blessings in ministry, his provision for us, his working at our church, our wonderful leadership team, and many more. God has been very active and we are trying to hang on for the ride!

One thing that we are especially thankful for is the provision that we received at the end of the year.  We started out in December looking at a deficit of over $2700 of support for the year.  We sent out a Christmas letter which was a summary of the year with just a short mention of that need.  The response was wonderful, and we ended the year with over $1400 surplus!  Thank you all for your generosity!  We praise God for this provision and trust that he will continue this year.

Thankfully the surplus from last year rolls into this year's budget, so we will have enough to make it through the first few months of this year.  We have monthly commitments for nearly 70% of our budget this year, which is an awesome start!  That leaves about $14000 to raise for the rest of the year. We would love it if many more people and churches would decide to make commitments to support us and our ministry!   Would you please join us in praying for this?  Might God be calling you to be one of our regular supporters?  You can get more info on how to do this by clicking here.  Through the church we currently can accept cash, checks, Chase Quickpay which links to a bank account, and we are working on our website and having a PayPal option.

January has been a busy month in other ways, including the launch of our church's newest ministry: Prayer Partners.  Here Rebecca and Anne are being commissioned for their leadership roles.  This ministry consists of teams that pray for people after each church service.  Up until now the pastors were doing this by themselves and so many people wanted prayer that they were very swamped!  Praise God that people want to be prayed for and to pray with others! 

We have also been busy being small group leaders at an interim class at Calvin College.  The class is called Spiritual Strength Training and is about how the Holy Spirit works.  At the end of each class we form small groups and answer questions and dive deeper into the material.  We have seen lots of growth in our students even though this is a very short course.  It is a large time commitment but the potential for fruit in these student's lives is limitless!

We took an afternoon recently to visit Grand Haven with our friend Victoria from church and a new friend Stephanie from Florida.  Stephanie is in Michigan helping with the class at Calvin, so we get to see her a lot.  She had never seen anything like the ice build up on the pier so it was pretty fun!

Michigan: frigid but beautiful!

We have continued to work on our house also, to the point of exhaustion sometimes!  The above room is our multipurpose room on the main level, it will be an office/guest-room/workout room, etc.  A lot was done in here: widening the door so we could get the washer and dryer in and out of the laundry room, scraping the sharp texture off the wall and filling in the remaining gaps with plaster, sanding down and finishing the floors, and painting, whew!

The laundry room got completely overhauled too, with a new tile floors, lots of work patching walls and the ceiling, and fresh paint.

We continue to feel awesomely blessed by having this house, and we are so excited with how it is turning out.  Thanks to all those who have helped us so far, and who will help in the future (we will need it come spring time!).