Looking back at September it seems like the month just whooshed by!  This was probably due to lots of activity in areas we do not normally have.  Included with our ‘regular’ daily activities Jim went to therapy for his hand recovery 2 to 3 times weekly and we made several road trips during the month.  We are truly grateful for busy activity because it keeps us involved in the lives of others!

CROSSROADS MISSIONS UPDATE

We were able to assist in another Help Build Hope event this month – in Louisville!  This event framed up two homes with about 125 volunteers on a local churches parking lot. The sponsoring church then followed one of the homes to the construction site to help engage with the family receiving the home, the workers and the neighborhood.  Imagine what doors can be opened as a witness for the Lord when lots of folks who are ‘volunteers” show up to work.  We pray for a great opportunity of seed planting, and the eventual harvest, for this church’s efforts.

Back in July the file server for the mission crashed.  Without a server all of our important files had to be carried around to users on portable drives, USB drives, or on CD/DVD media.  Doing so made things a bit more challenging.  Additionally, the data files that “run the mission” were being used without a comprehensive backup.  A decent file server, with operating system, can run several thousand dollars.  The Lord blessed with Kenn Krauss as a volunteer in helping terminate our network cables when we moved into our current building.  Kenn lives in the Louisville area and is a member at Jeffersontown Bible Church.  Kenn is a network expert!  Through his employment he had access to  a used Dell server.  Once configured, Kenn’s company donated the server to us and we are now back up and running after several months without this resource.  Thank you, Kenn, for your care and help!

WEB SITE MINISTRY

The Lord blessed us with being able to take several web sites to a ‘live’ status online.  Amongst them were the Collaborative for Neighborhood Transformation which received a new face .. www.neighborhoodtransformation.net and the Missionary Resource Group in Philadelphia also was the recipient of a new graphic look .. www.mrgp.org.

We have two additional web sites under development.  One for the St. Matthew’s Area Ministry and the other for the Eastern Area Community Ministry.  Both of these organizations are local ministries who are primarily funded by neighborhood churches.  Once we have them online we’ll be sharing with you their addresses so you can have a look!

CONFERENCE

For the past six years we have been attempting to attend the Global Missions Health Conference (www.medicalmissions.com).   This is an annual conference held here in Louisville.  This year looks like the year to do so!  We are registered and will be there representing our web site ministry and CrossRoads Missions!  The conference is held in November.  We’re very excited about this conference and the opportunities that the Lord may birth from it.

PERSONAL

Erika is in process of moving to Owensboro, Kentuckyas she is currently living there in the home of her Aunt and Uncle, Lisa and John Clouse, till she can locate an apartment in her price range. Owensboro is about 2 and 1/2 hours west of us.   She is receiving a transfer with Walgreens.  We’re very excited for Erika and praying that her launch and further steps will be very successful.

Did you notice the Red Rider logo on the right side of our web page?  Jim has been asked to serve on the local American Diabetes Association Tour de Cure fundraising bike ride for 2010.  His role will be to engage others with diabetes to ride in the tour.  Those who ride in the tour are called Red Riders.  Another opportunity for us to be ‘out there’ for the Lord.  More info to come on this as we roll into 2010.

Thank you for your partnership in the Gospel!  Please don’t hesitate to let us know how we can be praying for you.

Lord bless.. Jim and Phyllis