This note is in response to your prayer to the PS from the last note we sent. Here is what the PS said and you can read and see how your prayers were answered.
P.S. As I am sending this for Bob, he is on his way to Mississippi to help out for a few days with Katrina clean up with a small group from a local church. So far his feedback has been that the time in the van traveling was very rich. Please pray for them to be an encouragement for the folks there, and that the return trip will be equally rich. Some of the "team" are fairly new believers.
..."Bob, the car won't start.." Not the best way to start a Sunday morning when you are barely going to make it to church on time even IF you leave right now!
Our normally incredibly dependable and wonderful Avalon just had a case of loose batter connection, but by the time we figured that out, we were indeed late. So, we decided to head to one closer by. At the end of the service, they announced a Katrina relief trip to this camp in Ocean Springs, Mississippi - leaving the nest Wednesday. I had been praying for an opportunity to go on a 'roll up your sleeves' trip with some folks from our community! Suzanne and I both looked at each other and said, "That has your/my name written on it."
The camp was well organized with all tools provided, training, overseers and lots of good food and hot showers (and believe me by the end of the day they were a necessity of life) and they maintained a spiritual flavor with the large meeting devotionals and singing every morning before assignments followed by heading out to the houses. The ironic part of the trip was that the tents we stayed in were donated by the Russian army! They had a zip out polar lining that will feel good about now. Check here for more details on the camp - they still have lots of work to do! http://www.corebasecamp.com/ .
Click Here for more of my impressions about corebasecamp.
What fun it was to see a house in the few days we were there go from bombshell to pretty sweet smelling shiny studs once we had removed all the sheet rock and did the Clorox spray down to kill the mold. FEMA trash haulers came 3 times to haul off the hills of demolition spoils we were mounding up over the front yard. It was also rewarding to talk with the owners and hear their whole life stories (*see story below). The two houses we worked on ... the owners were in their 70's. Our team circled around at the beginning of each work session in the house and prayed for blessing on home and owner and safety as we worked.
The icing on the cake for this trip of course was the bonding of our team. Seven of us ... starting as virtually complete strangers... in a van for 8 hours there and 8 back sharing 3 meals a day and working like beavers together side by side from Wednesday to Sunday -- 4 men and 3 ladies. (Suzanne kept things going at home.) We were sharing our testimonies from the first minutes on the van ride out of Houston. Several were new Believers and one in his own words was ...'on his way'. Great time. Several kept saying how they had never experienced such closeness with a group before. I do think God was at work in this group. As you know me ... I gave the challenge for us to see what God is saying to us as individuals and as a group via the Quiet Time sharing ....
Soooo ... on the trip back we each shared our Quiet Times we had received from God to be our "church on the road" Sunday service as we returned to normalcy back in Houston. We looked to see what God would say to us to close our time together. This is the summary statement that congealed from the sharing from 7 different places in the Word that morning. --
Spend time with God humbly letting him heal me, clean me so my cup can be filled and I can be Jesus serving others.
God never ceases to amaze me how he speaks a specific timely message through the collection of personal shared QT's. Much like if He, Jesus, came to preach that day in and through our QT's.
Click Here to see summary of the sharing.
We had a great time listening to the story of a Katrina rescue from the owner
we served...and then ..he served me!
The water started rising in their house to waist deep even though they were "safely" more than a mile from the coast. He shared with us how a neighbor, John, floated his ski boat off it's trailer and drove over to rescue he and his wife and 35 year old daughter. On the way to safety they picked up a man they call Peter (for they never learned his name). They found Peter standing in chest deep water just as if he had nothing else planned to do that day. They then navigated the streets of Pascagoula to pick up James and his wife and 10 month old.
I asked, "Didn't the wind toss the boat in 130 mile per hour wind?!"
He answered, "We kept looking at the houses on the left and right and thinking how hard the wind was blowing over there but it did not appear to be blowing as hard where we were in the middle of the street."
Here's my paraphrase of the rest of his story...
"When we got to within 50 yards of "dry" land... Peter, James and John carried all to safety of a waiting police car. I stayed back sitting on the back of the boat waiting for the next pass." ( This man has emphysema so has a very hard time breathing when walking a few feet, much less thru 50 yards of knee deep water.) Then my foot got caught in the ski ladder and I fell into the water was trapped under the boat. Just then the wind shifted and the boat swung around and I popped up like a cork and into the arms of Peter who just had returned back to the boat to get me."
When we got to the shore I told Peter he could ride on my lap if there was not going to be enough room in the car for all of us. " Peter said that , no he would not be needing a ride. When I got into the car the policeman said to me, "Doesn't that other man want a ride too?" Then we turned to see Peter... but he had vanished....."
I bet you didn't hear this Katrina rescue story on Fox News. :o)
In the process of this home owner telling his story, he mentioned that his
daughter is deaf . I asked him if he would share his
and her life story with me.
So he told the story of how his adopted daughter had been born brain damaged, deaf and not given hope to ever be able to walk. What a dad this guy was... there was not an ounce of pride in what he went on to share but it was obvious that God had blessed he and his wife's efforts to help their daughter be all that she could be.
At 35 she walks, signs, lip reads and even reads! He said that they had organized volunteers from the community to come in 4 times a day ... every day... to show her picture flash cards with the word written on the back. The local paper company brought a pallet of paper cut to just the right size and volunteers came and stenciled the words in large letters on the back of each card.
As he was telling me this ... I had a chill go down my spine because he was telling me what I had already seen in my minds eye of what I wanted to do to help Dyslexic and deaf to learn to read by sight. But the beauty of the moment was that God brought me to Pascagoula to sit on this heroic dad's porch to hear a live testimonial of what teaching by the eye gate alone can do... even for the combination of brain damage and deafness.
It made me so excited to think that I could now with assurance add the few more lines of code to make the "His Hands Reader" do electronically what it took hours and hours by many volunteers to help this young lady learn to read. I felt like God was pleased with this man's sacrifice for his child... and he brought me to Pascagoula ( not to clean his storm damaged house) but to hear his life story with ministering to the special needs of his adopted daughter. God uses hurricanes to do allot of His good work. :o) Who knows... maybe the encouragement from his story will find its way into my code and be a blessing to others in the world where they don't have a dad like this, or a paper mill to give paper or neighbors who care so much. But one thing is for sure... they have a Dad in Heaven that cares and He brought me to hear the story.
The timing on this meeting was pretty incredible! For I had been mulling over for the past two months this design addition to the His Hands Reader literacy program. I had attended a Dyslexic readers workshop back in September and and out of that I felt sure that I needed to add a visual B-A-N-G to the reader to imprint the word via picture meaning direct to the student's visual recognition portion of the brain. Hearing this dad's story was like God putting 34 years of applied research right under my nose to confirm the mullings. It was like this be on a marquee saying, "YES!! There is a time and place to bypass other parts of the brain and go straight to imprinting word recognition via meaning images to teach reading skills. And that time is NOW, BOB!"
As I finish this Thanksgiving letter to you I am a little nostalgic in remembering.... A lot of good things in my life have come out of Pascagoula. That is the town where I asked Suzanne to marry me, in the middle of a green field - not a chemical plant ;)
Thanks for praying for the Katrina Relief trip. :o)
P.S. Our furlough is almost half done... we will be heading back to St. Petersburg, Russia in August 06.
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Bob 713-456-9595 Suzanne 713-456-9596
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