Finances

We first want to start off by thanking you all for praying for us! Thank you for your encouragement and kind words. We appreciate each one of you and are so very thankful for your partnership in the gospel! We have really seen the Lord do some amazing things since we sent out our ask letter in December. As we know that many of you are praying for us, we wanted to update you on what we have seen the Lord do. We are SO AMAZED and humbled by his gifts to us and just want to thank you for giving so sacrificially. Since December, we have seen close to $11,500 in one time gifts come in and approximately $1000/mo in new monthly support!! Praise the Lord!!! This is such an encouragement to us and gets us excited to continue to see what God has in store for us as we continue on the support trail. We are currently at 40% of our goal! We ask that you please continue to pray that our efforts will be blessed, the Lord will meet us where we are at and that we will continually be developed and refined by Him, and that we will hit our goal (or beyond) by June. Also, we will need to move again by June as our lease is up and we do not know where we will be going, so please pray that we will find a great place to live within our budget and that another move will not be hard on the kids (they really don't want to move again). Thank you all again and please let us know what we can be praying for you!

How to Ruin Your Life by 30...

Tony got an invitation to the AGR greek house at ISU to give a presentation called How To Ruin Your Life by 30 and is based on the book with the same title by Steve Farrar. It was exciting to see 32 greek students show up to listen!  How to Ruin Your Life by 30 is about the everyday mistakes you are making right now that will quickly catch up with you and ultimately ruin your life. It is designed to help students to learn how to handle priorities, responsibility, relationships, finances, learn about cause and effect and where good priorities come from. They really enjoyed the program and 28 out of 32 students indicated that they wanted more information about God and bible studies! This is wonderful news and a great start to branching into the greek system.

TCX 2013

Happy New Year! We hope that you all had a wonderful holiday! We were able to spend Christmas with our families and then on December 27th we headed up to Minneapolis, MN for our annual TCX conference. We brought the kids with us this year and they really loved it! We had 45 students attend from ISU and ? Community College and a total of 1,500 students from all over the midwest. You can check out our TCX website http://gotcx.com/ to see photos, listen to talks and hear what the students are saying about the conference. The students got to hear from some amazing speakers this year: Troy Dobbs, Nicole Lewis and Dr. KP Yohannan. Troy Dobbs is the Senior Pastor at Grace Church in Eden Prairie, MN. Nicole Lewis works with the Greater Northwest Global Missions team, traveling to encourage Cru missionaries. Dr. KP Yohannan is the founder and international director of Gospel for Asia, a missions organization involved in reaching the unreached in Asian nations.

Along with great sessions, the students got opportunities to attend seminars in the afternoons. Once again, Tony was able to teach a seminar on the Holy Spirit. He has really enjoyed teaching this it has been a popular one among the students. If you check out the TCX website, you will be able to hear a few of the seminars that were recorded: Bible Studies, Love of Scripture, God's Love, Art of Manliness, Heaven, Making Disciples, Perspectives on Homosexuality...to name a few.

During the conference, the students get an opportunity to do a community outreach and share Christ with the city of Minneapolis. The students connect with local churches and hand out Boxes of Love (food) to the needy in the churches areas. As they hand out these boxes, the students are able to share Christ with those that receive the box as well  as give them information to connect them to a local church. This outreach is great for those that receive the box, but the students also are touched by the lives that they share with and always come back from the day of outreach with hundreds of stories about how the Lord was working! Below is a picture from the day of outreach. The moving trucks were full of boxes!

The evening session on December 30 consisted of the one act play called The Bema (www.thebema.org). This incredible play is a fictional drama inspired by 2 Corinthians 5:10 that we must all appear before the judgement seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due to him for the things done while in the body. The Bema was originally performed by Pete Briscoe and we have a staff member with Cru that performed it for the students. If you visit  http://new.livestream.com/cruwinter/tcx2013 and scroll down to Dec. 30 session 5, you will be able to hear the student's experiences from the day of outreach then watch The Bema (if you want to skip straight to The Bema, you can skip ahead to around the 47:00 minute mark).


It has been a number of years since we have brought our kids to TCX, so they were very excited to come! The conference provides childcare during the morning and evening sessions so that the staff parents are able to attend. One thing that we love about the childcare is that it isn't just a babysitting service. There is curriculum so that our children are hearing the gospel as well! This year our kids got to learn about the 10/40 window and do a service project at Feed My Starving Children.  Clare was able to go with Ellie and Isaiah to FMSC and pack meals for families overseas and it was such a wonderful and amazing experience. Now, our kids tell us that they want to travel to countries in the 10/40 window so that they can share Jesus with them! If you want to learn more about Feed My Starving Children visit http://www.fmsc.org/