Happy May 15th

Just wanted to give a quick update about our recent happenings. We purchased our tickets to Tokyo yesterday, May 14th, and we will be leaving from Raleigh, N.C. on Monday, August 13th. We will arrive in Tokyo on August 15th and will stay with friends for a couple of days before we go to Shimonoseki. We were able to get our tickets for a great price thanks to a travel agency in California that helps missionaries find cheap tickets.

God has continued to provide for our needs. We are currently at 59% for our one-time outfit and passage fund, and we are at 48% out of $3200.00 needed for our monthly support. Our goals are to be at 50% for each fund by the end of May, so Praise the Lord we have already exceeded that for our one-time and only 2% away for our monthly support goal. We are well on our way to our goal of 75% support that we hope to have by the end of June. We have also added several prayer partners for the month of May but we are still looking for people who would be willing to pray for us and our ministry in Japan.

We have 2 speaking engagements set up for the rest of May and are praying for more opportunities in June and July. In the past few days we have submitted several documents needed to obtain our visa to live in Japan. Please pray that the information is correct and that the process continues to go smoothly.

If you have any questions or ideas please don't hesitate to contact us through email.

Blessings Continue

Praise the Lord for His never ending blessings. We were able to speak in our home church this last Sunday and it was great to fellowship with people that are excited about what God is doing in our lives. I am no longer working at a local hospital, but this has allowed me to accomplish many task in the past two weeks. God has allowed me to contact and inform many people and several churches about our coming time in Japan. It is very encouraging being able to talk to people face to face and both Stephanie and I hope that this will help to grow our prayer and financial partners both in number and in their desire to see God move in Japan. We are still in Lynchburg VA but have set a date of June 18th for our move to North Carolina and a tentative date of Aug 15th as the date we would like to leave for Japan. We are still looking at plane ticket prices so that we can get the best deal possible but hope that we can purchase them soon. As of today we are currently at 17% of our monthly $3200 Support that we need to be in Japan. While $3200 seems like an insurmountable number it is nothing to our God that owns the cattle on a thousand hills (Ps 50:10- I like the farm reference). If we had just 55 more people that would commit to donate $50 a month we would exceed our goal of $3200. We are very grateful to those that have already committed to support us on any level, whether $5 a month, a one time donation, or committing to become a prayer partner. We are extremely thankful for the prayer partners because if somebody is praying for you then you know that they care about you and are willing to take time to intercede on your behalf. Thanks again for all of your thoughts and prayers. Please don't hesitate to call or email if you have any questions, ideas or thoughts.
David

We are moved!!!

Praise the Lord in His infinite wisdom and His perfect timing. Thank you for your prayers for us to get a renter for our home, and praise the Lord He has provided a renter that will move in Saturday, March 24th. We were blessed by several of our friends coming out this past Saturday and helping us move into a small apartment that we will be living in until June; at which time we will be moving down to North Carolina so we can be closer to our home church.

Preparing and Packing Part 3:

Our next stage in the area of preparing and packing is PACKING!!! Tony and Marcia Haug (the missionaries in Japan) told us that the main items that we need to bring with us are clothes. Mostly everything else that we need we will be able to purchase second hand. We were only planning on bringing one bag each with the necessities and purchase clothes there but we were told that we might have trouble finding clothes that fit our exact sizes. Because of this we will be bringing most of the clothes that we want to wear for the next 3 years. We will be able to order clothes online and I will try to go through companies that have free international shipping.

Shimonoseki Japan is very close to the longitude of Virginia, so we will need to bring clothes for all of the seasons. I have been going through our clothes and picking out items that I know we will need and want to take with us. Once we get to Japan storage of large suitcases may be a problem because space is limited in apartments so we are planning on using various sized duffle bags to pack our things because we can fold those up and then store them easily.

Along with clothes, we will be bringing various materials for our English teaching ministries. I have many classroom items that I would love to take with us from my teaching times here in the states but I have narrowed it down to a box full of my favorite things. Many of the worksheets that we want to bring will be scanned and put on a USB so we can print them when we get over there. We were told that this is the easiest way to bring all of the worksheets and materials that we want.