Birthdays, camps, Pastor Lupe, hurricanes, immigration and doctors!!

First of all, Happy Birthday Marina! Today’s your day!

Additionally, my brother Randy’s birthday is the 10th and Savannah’s 6th birthday is on the 19th (party on the 16th, we get to participate a little via live video over the internet!) and then Lidia’s birthday is the 27th!

The guy’s visits to the camps last week had mixed results. We were really encouraged to find a wonderful working model of a camp church already in place in Campo Cinco. The guys were invited to come and observe the service and it was great. There were about 100 people in attendance (the camp will have about 2,000 people when it’s at full capacity) and there is a pastor in residence at the camp! He holds services twice a week in a building provided by the camp owners no less! What a blessing. It would be wonderful to duplicate this success in the camps that we visit and we’ll be doing a lot of praying in the hope that the Lord will make a way for church services in ALL of the camps!

The visits to Campo Santa Lucia and San Juan were the usual little bit of run around…they were told by the folks in the office for those two camps that they’ll need to have a card in order to visit. Never needed one before, and they actually visited both camps on the same day as the office visit and were never asked for the card. Oh well. The camp officials asked them to come back in November to get the card, perhaps they’ll require it after that. Please pray that the camps would remain open to visits.

Several of you wrote after hearing US reports about hurricane John’s path…and for a couple of days it was projected to come near us, but as things do with those weather systems, things changed and it moved away from us, praise the Lord. We did get some heavy rains and winds (and a little water in the kitchen again) on Thursday night, but then it did a left turn and went out more to the Baja. Thankfully, as it traveled up the Baja it lost speed and was downgraded to a tropical depression. It did drop a lot of rain on the Baja though, 20 inches in some places and that is a total desert environment so there was a lot of flash flooding. Overall there wasn’t much damage because it’s pretty sparsely populated. The storm pretty much skirted around the resort communities on the tip of the Baja. If you ever want to track storms you hear about, here’s the web site that we use: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ You’ll want to scroll down to the Eastern Pacific information and the maps that we tend to follow are the tropical wind speed and the 5 day warning cone. La Cruz is just opposite the tip of the Baja peninsula and slightly north.

We had lunch with Pastor Lupe and his wife Emilia in Mazatlan last week and had a good time getting to know them a little better. We just tend not to see them too much. They are doing fine, and are excited to go to Alberta Canada to speak at a church there during Holy Week this coming spring. They are also involved in the local organizing for the Billy Graham television broadcast that is coming in November, hoping to encourage as many people as possible to watch the broadcast. Please pray that the Mexican people would tune into this broadcast and hear the message of hope in Christ.

Pastor Lupe also did the newest required letter for immigration and it’s now in their hands…and of course they couldn’t say if this was all they would need or when we might expect the visa. Ralph is thinking we’ll give them a couple of weeks and then give a call, hoping they have it worked out at last. Continued prayer on this issue wouldn’t hurt!

My cousin Donna did well in her surgery on Thursday, praise the Lord. I talked with her and her daughter Julie on Friday and both seemed pretty chipper. They’ll get the biopsy results this week, and Donna should be able to leave the hospital later this week too! Then several weeks of home recovery and she should be back on her feet. Thank you for your prayers.

And speaking of biopsy results, Ralph’s are back and the lesion that was removed from his scalp was malignant after all. So Dr. Maldonado has referred him to see an oncologist in Mazatlan. That will happen in the next couple of weeks. Both the doc and Ralph feel it is a precautionary visit, just to be on the safe side. Ralph has had many skin cancers removed over the years, a few of those have been malignant and have not required treatment because of all of the cells were removed by wide margins when the original surgeries were done. As the doc says about this one, he went deep and wide to remove all traces of this thing, but he wants to be completely sure nothing more is needed! Gotta love that kind of follow through. Please pray for clear communications and a clean bill of health. It is somewhat more difficult to communicate medically in Spanish than in every day conversations. It’s really important to be clearly understood and to clearly understand!!

Please pray for Lidia as well. We watched the Lumppio girls the other night while Tom took Lidia into see the doc as she’s been struggling with a chain of infections that have kept her feeling pretty crummy. She’s on a new treatment presently and is hoping that will get rid of everything once and for all! That’s our prayer too.

Thanks to Bob and Sue for a new set of Pastor Bill’s sermons!!! Love getting them…gives us a taste of our home church!

Thanks so much to all of you for your notes, cards, pictures, e-mails and prayers! They are so important to us!