I saw this website called www.myfootprint.org where you can take a quiz to see what kind of ecological impact your living style has on the Earth. In my current living state, I require about 19 acres to live. Which means that if everyone was like me, we would need 4.3 planet Earths for everyone to survive.

The idea of taking care of our planet is a high value for those in the area of Germany that we are moving to so I have to make a choice:

• 1) I could just be the “ignorant” American and go on with my life as normal (which would probably make many of the people around us angry)
• 2) I could be offended that they would expect me to do things the way they do them and try to make everyone else conform to my way of doing things. (boy, if you thought option 1 would upset my neighbors…)
• or 3) I could learn how the Germans do things and change the way I do things to integrate with their society

There’s a fine line that missionaries walk when integrating with a culture. As missionaries we are called to show God’s love and teach those we come in contact with about how Jesus Christ is the only way to have a close, intimate relationship with God.

Missionaries are welcomed when they fulfill that calling. They are shunned (or worse) when they come not only sharing about Jesus Christ but also pushing their personal/cultural values on top of the Gospel. The New Testament is filled with different situations where Paul had to struggle with those who were the “circumcision group” where they added to the gospel the Jewish cultural value of circumcision to the Gentiles.

Please pray with us and other missionaries that we speak only the Gospel to the world and do not add to it our cultural values.

http://capitalhead.com/articles/click-to-activate-and-use-this-control—kb912812.aspx

For all of you that use Internet Explorer and are receiving those annoying “Click to activate and use this control” whenever you go over a flash navigation or came to my site and got the “ActiveX control loading” pop-up because of the embedded video that was on the frontpage, we now have a solution. And I don’t mean just going out and getting Firefox.

Go to the above article and scroll down to the bottom. Select the proper link for your computer configuration and download the fix. You will most likely have to reboot your computer when you are done.

All of this because Microsoft infringed upon another company’s software patents. I am surpised Microsoft just didn’t buy the company!!!

Hope this helps many of you out that may not know why this was happening to you.

This is how we feel sometimes!! As we go through this whole process of preparing to leave for the field, we feel high above the ground without a safety net. The cool thing is that this is not true. We are held up by God as this is what He has for us. As we talk to people asking them to support our ministry through prayer and financial giving, we walk a tight line - on one side, we can be very egotistical and think that this ministry is all about us and what God has called US to do (and that is a very long drop if we go in that direction) or on the other side, we can be very timid and not talk to anyone about it (again, a big SPLAT). The reality is that our ministry is all about whats on the other end of the rope - People coming to understand God’s grace and love.

If you would like to hear more about how God is doing this in Europe, please contact us, we would love to talk to you about it.

About the picture: Don’t worry - it’s just a wrought-iron sculpture of a tightrope walker (or the like) on top of the Götzenturm in the city of Heilbronn.

Heilbronn is a lovely wine-growing city (pop. 120,000) and the cultural and economic center of the Heilbronn-Franken region. Beautifully situated in the heart of the Neckar valley, Heilbronn is one of Germany’s biggest wine-growing communities, surrounded by 510 hectares (1,260 acres) of hillside vineyards.

After seven years of bouncing between a bowling alley, then a skating rink, then a YMCA, our church, Lake Forest Church, has finally moved into its own building. This is a very exciting time for all of us. The drive to build the church building came when Krista and I were deciding whether or not eDOT was the place God was calling us to. Ironically, the drive was called “Dare you to move”. We joke all the time that they dared us and now we are moving. I also joke anytime that someone says something like “Doesn’t it upset you when such and such happens?” to which I reply, “Yeah, I think I’ll just leave the country!”

But isn’t that the state of the church both in Europe and the US? People get upset with something in the church and say “Fine, I’ll just leave”. Here in the Bible Belt (i.e. Southern US), people seem to just jump to the next church down the road. In other places, they just leave the church completely. In Europe, churches are struggling - places that once held people for worship are now dance clubs, apartments or tourist traps. Europeans don’t see Jesus’ love in the church and so they don’t see a need for church and therefore no need for God.

So now I ask those that are a part of any church - Do you Dare to Move? I am not asking you to literally move (like Krista and I), but are you willing to move with the Holy Spirit and show people the love of Christ? People will still leave the church (just as people walked away from Jesus) but are we really doing all that we can to show people God’s love. If not, think about the different ways we could!! What about feeding the hungry, listening to a teenager who just needs to be heard, visiting an elderly person who can’t get out to see anyone or just smiling warmly at someone as you pass by them. How are you called to share God’s love?

I subscribe to Mikey’s Funnies where I am sent a joke or funny story on a daily basis. Every now and then, he sends out one that is more of a thought provoker than funny. Every year on the Thursday before Easter, this is the “funny” he sends out.

THE RICH FAMILY IN CHURCH
By Eddie Ogan

I’ll never forget Easter 1946. I was 14, my little sister Ocy was 12,and my older sister Darlene 16. We lived at home with our mother, and the four of us knew what it was to do without many things. My dad had died five years before, leaving Mom with seven school kids to raise and no money.

By 1946 my older sisters were married and my brothers had left home. A month before Easter the pastor of our church announced that a special Easter offering would be taken to help a poor family. He asked everyone to save and give sacrificially.

When we got home, we talked about what we could do. We decided to buy 50 pounds of potatoes and live on them for a month. This would allow us to save $20 of our grocery money for the offering. When we thought that if we kept our electric lights turned out as much as possible and didn’t listen to the radio, we’d save money on that month’s electric bill. Darlene got as many house and yard cleaning jobs as possible, and both of us babysat for everyone we could. For 15 cents we could buy enough cotton loops to make three pot holders to sell for $1.

We made $20 on pot holders. That month was one of the best of our lives.

Every day we counted the money to see how much we had saved. At night we’d sit in the dark and talk about how the poor family was going to enjoy having the money the church would give them. We had about 80 people in church, so figured that whatever amount of money we had to give, the offering would surely be 20 times that much. After all, every Sunday the pastor had reminded everyone to save for the sacrificial offering.

The day before Easter, Ocy and I walked to the grocery store and got the manager to give us three crisp $20 bills and one $10 bill for all our change.

We ran all the way home to show Mom and Darlene. We had never had so much money before.

That night we were so excited we could hardly sleep. We didn’t care that we wouldn’t have new clothes for Easter; we had $70 for the sacrificial offering.

We could hardly wait to get to church! On Sunday morning, rain was pouring. We didn’t own an umbrella, and the church was over a mile from our home, but it didn’t seem to matter how wet we got. Darlene had cardboard in her shoes to fill the holes. The cardboard came apart, and her feet got wet.

But we sat in church proudly. I heard some teenagers talking about the Smith girls having on their old dresses. I looked at them in their new clothes, and I felt rich.

When the sacrificial offering was taken, we were sitting on the second row from the front. Mom put in the $10 bill, and each of us kids put in a $20.

As we walked home after church, we sang all the way. At lunch Mom had a surprise for us. She had bought a dozen eggs, and we had boiled Easter eggs with our fried potatoes! Late that afternoon the minister drove up in his car. Mom went to the door, talked with him for a moment, and then came back with an envelope in her hand. We asked what it was, but she didn’t say a word. She opened the envelope and out fell a bunch of money. There were three crisp $20 bills, one $10 and seventeen $1 bills.

Mom put the money back in the envelope. We didn’t talk, just sat and stared at the floor. We had gone from feeling like millionaires to feeling like poor white trash. We kids had such a happy life that we felt sorry for anyone who didn’t have our Mom and Dad for parents and a house full of brothers and sisters and other kids visiting constantly. We thought it was fun to share silverware and see whether we got the spoon or the fork that night.

We had two knifes that we passed around to whoever needed them. I knew we didn’t have a lot of things that other people had, but I’d never thought we were poor.

That Easter day I found out we were. The minister had brought us the money for the poor family, so we must be poor. I didn’t like being poor. I looked at my dress and worn-out shoes and felt so ashamed–I didn’t even want to go back to church. Everyone there probably already knew we were poor!

I thought about school. I was in the ninth grade and at the top of my class of over 100 students. I wondered if the kids at school knew that we were poor. I decided that I could quit school since I had finished the eighth grade. That was all the law required at that time. We sat in silence for a long time. Then it got dark, and we went to bed. All that week, we girls went to school and came home, and no one talked much. Finally on Saturday, Mom asked us what we wanted to do with the money. What did poor people do with money? We didn’t know. We’d never known we were poor. We didn’t want to go to church on Sunday, but Mom said we had to. Although it was a sunny day, we didn’t talk on the way.

Mom started to sing, but no one joined in and she only sang one verse. At church we had a missionary speaker. He talked about how churches in Africa made buildings out of sun dried bricks, but they needed money to buy roofs. He said $100 would put a roof on a church. The minister said, “Can’t we all sacrifice to help these poor people?” We looked at each other and smiled for the first time in a week.

Mom reached into her purse and pulled out the envelope. She passed it to Darlene. Darlene gave it to me, and I handed it to Ocy. Ocy put it in the offering.

When the offering was counted, the minister announced that it was a little over $100. The missionary was excited. He hadn’t expected such a large offering from our small church. He said, “You must have some rich people in this church.”

Suddenly it struck us! We had given $87 of that “little over $100.”

We were the rich family in the church! Hadn’t the missionary said so? From that day on I’ve never been poor again. I’ve always remembered how rich I am because I have Jesus!

For a followup on Eddie (who is a woman), check out this story –> http://snipurl.com/richgirl