I’m sure you have all been wondering about me and how everything is going so far.  I am currently in Ormoc City at a missionary family’s home who was kind enough to allow us to use the internet to send off a quick email before we continue on to Tacloban this evening.

I have spent the last week in Davao doing leadership training with the other team leaders, and then doing orientation with my team members when they arrived on Thursday.  Just to share a quick story with you, Friday night was our first night sleeping in tents at the camping area where we were doing orientation. It hadn’t rained really hard until Thursday, but Friday night it started to downpour at around 11:30 PM. This continued well into the next day.  Around 2:00 am, I woke up and felt like I was sleeping on a waterbed which typically isn’t a good feeling in a tent! A few items were even floating in the tents. The tents were flooded and we evacuated before the waters came up any higher. Several people were already awake, and pretty soon almost everyone was gathered under a large gazebo.

I just thank you for all of your prayers so far. The Holy Spirit really is working the Philippines, and I am looking forward to seeing where God is at work on the Umot River in Can-Avid in Eastern Samar where we will be spreading the Word of the Gospel and living among the Waray (pronounced Waa-rye) people. The people of the Philippines are incredibly friendly, and love talking to us where ever we go. Continue to pray for us as we travel up the river to visit people and places who have never heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We will be going house to house and sharing the gospel through film and participatory bible studies, and doing public drama presentations as well as sharing our own testimonies through translators. I also ask that you pray for the other teams sharing the Gospel along the Dolores River near us, on Camotes Island, Dinagaat Island, Dapitan, Manilla, and several orphanages throughout the country.

If you are interested in keeping up with where we are and what we are doing, I encourage you to go to www.nehemiahteams.com and look for the blog link on the page probably under the heading of “What?” and then “American,” and then under Waray Riverboat teams or specifically Can-Avid. We have a media person traveling with us and the Dolores riverboat team to take pictures and update the journals and blogs once or twice a week.

This will probably be the last chance I have to get to email for a while, so I hope all is going well back on the other side of the world. As always, please forward this on to others who are not on the list, and please share this with your church congregations. I could not have done this without the support of everyone around. Thank you for responding to God’s calling.

I leave you with the farewell call of the Moravians: “May the Lamb who was slain receive the reward that He is worthy of.”