Tina, the Twins and I packed up Saturday and drove about 3 hours to the home of Steve and Kathy Button. Steve is the Pastor of the Carpinteria Valley Baptist church of Carpinetria, California. Tina and I had met Steve and Kathy when they lived in Martinez, CA. Once we even spent almost three weeks with them during our deputation travels many years ago. They graciously received us into their home and we enjoyed all the catching up kind of conversations we had with them. The church had a nice projection system and even a remote control device, so I was able to give our PowerPoint presentation without sitting at the computer. It was the first time we gave our presentation and put out our display, so I was a bit nervous about it, but all seemed to go well. We met a lot of friendly people and were encouraged by their generosity and good will.
Sunday afternoon we relaxed at Steve and Kathy’s house and then prepared to go to Oakview, a town near Ojai, about 15-30 min from Carpinteria. Just before we were to go, we found out that the Oakview church was having problems with their projector. Steve graciously offered to lend us their own personal projector for the day, so thanks to him we were able to give a slide show of our missionary experiences in the church at Oakview Sunday night.
The Oakview church proved very friendly and we were remembered by a good number of the people. Pastor Linn Carothers and I have some things in common (country churches, college professors, etc) and I enjoyed the time we had together, but wish we had more time to get to know each other better. That night we gave our presentation and were asked to give our testimonies, explain our call to the mission filed and share our vision for our future ministry. We had a good Q&A time as well, so the service went overtime, but everyone seemed happy and hung around for an after church fellowship. We were invited to a spaghetti dinner at the pastor's home after church and had a chance to speak to a group of teenagers that were there. When they found out that our daughters Bethany and Rachel are going to Pensacola Christian College, there was a lot of interest among the teens about why we picked that school and what was it like. We challenged the teens to consider going to a Bible College and missions as a possible life path.
The roads were clear late Sunday, so we were able to return to Long Beach in just 2 hours.
Bethany and Rachel are flying in from college to be with us Monday at 9 PM! It has been a LONG time since we have seen them! God is good and we are experiencing many blessings by meeting many good people and being able to enjoy some precious family fellowship.
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