Booth Broadcast August 2018

In my quiet time with the Lord I have been reading through Hosea. It was a poignant reminder to do personal scans of what was capturing my heart. It’s for each of us to make sure no modern day idol has a hold of us and to worship the Lord only. It made me realise how far the Lord has bought me in my walk with Him and that my response should be praise. In Chap 14 v8 right before the prophet finishes his words he wrote of God’s blessing for those who worship him, “O Ephraim, what more have I to do with idols? It is I who answer and look after you. I am like a luxuriant cypress, from Me comes your fruit. “ Let these words be an encouragement to you as you faithfully live your life in Christ.

The Caleb Leadership Course for 2018 is completed. It was a very good experience although not without its difficulties.

As usual we had some participants drop out at the last minute. Plus five pastors wanting to come in from overseas (Africa, India and UAE) were all denied visas. Next time we will try another way of helping them apply. We ended up with eleven participants three from Australia. One of the difficult aspects was the number of trainers who had to step away from the training for a period due to family illnesses and Church pastoral issues. This meant we had a fluid group of trainers which made my life a little difficult. We had an interesting challenge with the Aussies disappointing performance but praise the Lord, it was sorted enough that they went on to graduate.

The training team did an amazing job of delivering a high quality course with a realism based on experience and not on being an ‘expert’. In fact one of the Baptist Pastors made a comment that our ‘ordinariness’ was a huge plus for him. 
Jill Burrows our administrator did a fabulous job and I have appreciated the hard work and diligence she put into making the course a success.
One graduate said of the course; “I came a sceptic and I leave a convert.”
Thank you for your prayers over this time.
We are now working on whether to do next year’s leadership course in Nelson or Christchurch. We are considering trying the live in model again. We did this several years ago and it had some significant pluses but some financial challenges. This concept would need extra funding to enable it to be doable.

Coming up

Yvonne and Hannah will join me in Nelson so they can spend time with Yvonne’s siblings. After that we travel to Ashburton to spend time with Rachel, Jonny and Caleb. Caleb has his first tooth and is beginning to crawl. So it will be exciting to see them. We will be having a holiday for a couple of weeks and visiting other friends down south.

Tim’s football team won their competition. I’m very proud of how Tim played and how often he scored. Reminds me of someone. Mind you he didn’t get any yellow cards.

Jay and Sakura are going to Hawaii for a couple of weeks well-earned rest.

Hannah had her birthday on the 5th of August. She is now 25 years old. Where did that all go?

One thing we do need prayer for is that on 5th March, Yvonne and I met with a person from Taikura Trust to apply for family funded care for Hannah. It would mean that Yvonne would get a small pay for looking after Hannah. We were told it would take 3 weeks. We are still waiting. I found out two days ago that the lady we were working with has resigned (not my fault – just saying) The replacement has made no contact. We made contact and an assistant said that the funding wasn’t happening when we’d been told in March that it would. Now we have to wait again for the new case manager to contact. Please pray that we would get the funding to help Yvonne who works so hard to give Hannah a good journey through life.

Thank you for your faithfulness to us and the mission. Without it we would not be able to continue.

Rex, Yvonne, Rachel, Jonny and Caleb, Jeremy and Sakura, Tim and Aimee and Hannah.