A loooong trip to Germany

The first week of February I was in Mosbach, Germany for a meeting of Reach Beyond's IT managers and then to attend ICCM. The events were at the OM Germany facility which you can see in two of the photos.

Every two years we try to get together the IT team from our various offices for a time of encouragement and planning. This was the first time in four years that we have met face-to-face. There were two long days of our meetings followed by three days of the ICCM conference.

The International Conference on Computing and Mission (ICCM) is a unique conference focused on techies serving mission and ministries organized by these same people. The Reach Beyond IT group attended the ICCM Europe conference as it provided a more central location for our people coming from England, Spain, Malaysia, the U.S. and Ecuador.

What a great time to encourage each other as we serve Jesus as techies!

The train from Frankfurt was fairly high-speed and we hit 200 Kmh.

I purposely didn't include photos of people in this as many work in difficult areas.

New life!

Marlene had the opportunity to share with Adriana about the problems we had with lactose in the diet of our son.

Her son, Martin, was having behavioral problems and she wanted to hear anything which might be of help to her.

During the time Marlene spent with her, she heard about how different foods can affect people and more importantly, how much God loves her. During their time together, Adriana prayed to receive Jesus as her Lord and Savior.

That is what I call getting a lot of good news!

Alejandro y Sara

While in Canada last summer we shared about Alejandro and Sara. She had received a vaccination that made her very ill (about 3 years ago) and Alejandro had fallen 4 meters through a skylight and hit his head (8 months ago). She has recovered well but he is having problems. Due to the brain damage he received it appears that he is losing his vision and the doctors here indicated that he needed surgery.

We put him in contact with Dr. Roy who just happened to be here for Jornadas Medicas (a medical conference hosted by the Hospital Vozandes) which invites healthcare givers from all over to participate. Dr. Roy had given a session at the conference and by God's arrangement Marlene was able to talk with him and it turns out in his family he has experienced similar problems to what Alejandro is experiencing. He agreed to talk with this couple.

Dr. Roy was able to provide some encouragement to Alenjandro and Sara but it wasn't the news that they may have been expecting.

Please continue to pray for this couple as they seek to overcome some depression and continue to work on the physical and mental therapy that Alejandro needs to stop the degeneration of his vision. In the midst of this we pray that God would heal their hearts as they see that God is real and loves us even facing difficult situations. In fact many times he allows these same situations so we will look to him.

Food allergies

Last week we gave our talk on very active children to a group of teachers and staff at a small daycare facility. Once again one of the attendees came up to talk with us afterwards. It turns out that her own son was describing to her the same symptoms that we had been describing in the talk when someone has an intolerance of lactose.

She felt terrible because she had made her son drink milk because of her concern that he not suffer malnutrition without realizing that the very thing which she thought was best for him, caused him the most trouble.

The responses we have been receiving from people who hear us, encourage us to carry on. The more people who understand how food allergies affect children the better.

At the close we were able to pray with the group of teachers and care-givers who look after a number of children during the day and evening when their parent or parents are out working as street vendors. What a challenge to help these young lives and we pray that many of them would come to know Jesus as their Lord and Saviour.

Faraday cage

Not sure how many of you know what a Faraday cage is. It is a wire mesh or cage which is used to protect something from radio frequencies or voltages, etc. For example, the first photo shows a Faraday Cage being used to protect a human being from very high voltage (artificial lightning).



When Reach Beyond (previously HCJB) had our transmitter site in Pifo, we had the engineers houses wrapped in wire to protect the families from the radiation off of the antennas.

Well, the other day as I was walking to work, I came across a local version of the Faraday Cage.

Fishing for lunch

On Boxing Day, we decided to do something different and fish for our lunch. You didn't need to have any talent to catch these guys but it was fun anyway. Joel didn't like the idea of having the fish killed and so didn't want to fish. Joshua caught 2, Grandpa 3, Grandma 2, Marlene 2 and I caught 3 (1 without using bait).

With the 12 fish we caught, they weighed in at 3.8 Kg. The restaurant prepared the fish and of course, when they serve the plate with the fish, it is the whole fish, head and tail included! The trout were very tasty!

Grandma had brought a couple of Gospel tracts about being "Fishers of men" and it was very appropriate to present them to the workers there.

Baptism of Joshua and Joel

We had the joy of seeing both Joshua and Joel be baptized on December 6. Both of them had been asking about baptism for more than a year now. The children's ministry pastor had mentioned that he was giving baptism classes to teach the kids what it means to be baptized and that Joshua and Joel could be a part of it. Both of them have expressed many times over the past couple of years that Jesus is their Lord and Saviour. They both wanted to follow Jesus in obedience by being baptized.

In the service that we normally attend Pastor Conto baptized our boys (and a fair number of other young people). It was a joy to see these young people following Jesus in baptism.