North Richland Hills, Texas

For those that don't know, our family is looking for a new sponsoring church as well as some supporting churches. This year has been a tough year for us financially as we lost about 40% of our support.

When all of that happened we turned to our friends at Missions Resource Network (MRN).

They have been an incredible encouragement to us as they've met with us weekly on Skype to help us learn more about the Disciple Making Ministry and how we can implement that when we return home in January. They've also encouraged us spiritually as we've begun looking for new support. And they've also helped us look for new support. They've given us names of people to get in contact with about becoming a financial partner. I don't know where we'd be if it weren't for MRN.

We were originally planning on coming back to the states in November and leaving in January. MRN encouraged us to come a little bit earlier. Why? Because they wanted us to attend the Global Missions Conference in North Richland Hills, Texas. They told us it would be encouraging to us and would be a good place for us to network and share about our needs.

This is a conference that is held every 3 years and it, literally, brings people from all around the world to share about missions.

I don't believe we could have done anything more important to us personally and for our ministry in Porto Alegre than to go to this conference right off the plane.

We were able to hear some great speakers from the states, from Kenya, from S. Africa and from Ghana. We worshipped in English for the first time in a long time. We got to see friends and fellow missionaries from Brasil. We ran into old friends of ours from college. Friends from A&M and friends from where we used to live. We had some good, deep conversations with people about what God is doing in POA and what our family needs are. The kids had great classes and made some friends. 

We also got to spend some good quality, face to face time with our family at MRN. We can't share how much we love those guys and how much they mean to us.

The entire week has been a huge blessing to our family.

We wanted to share about a specific person today and we'll try to share more specifics later on about our week.

After two days of searching for her, we finally got to see one of our most favorite people in the world.

Her name is Dottie and we got to know her a few years ago when she came to be a speaker at a conference we were at. She stayed in our house after the conference and we grew a deep love for her.

Dottie was a missionary to the Netherlands for many years. She now works for MRN as their director for missionary care.

She is wise, loving, caring and, like I said, one of our most favorite people in the world and that is not an understatement. I can't tell you how she has blessed our family. When we see her somehow God just transfers His peace to us through her. She is definitely a woman after God's own heart.

This is a long furlough and it's tough being away from home for so long but being able to spend time with people like Dottie is already making it worth it.