July 2010

Heather and I send our love and prayers to you all this month and trust all is well. We are fired up and in full “swing” for summer! Our amazing kid’s camp has a western theme this year so we are feeling right at home with a bit of Texas around every corner and on every team member. Miss Christen’s Dad took up a collection last year from his Cowboy Church of TONS of authentic hats, boots and cowboy shirts. Most of the things were slightly used but everything was in pretty good to great condition. Some things were still in their wrappings. Wow! Stetson hats, all the accessories like jail keys and money bags and sheriff badges. Man, these Irish guys are livin’ in tall cotton!! The team looks great… thanks, Chris!!

We have really seen the Hand of God in prepping for camp this year. We have nearly doubled our target for registrations to 300 children and therefore needed a much bigger staff. We normally run with 45 or so workers but needed 65 this time around. We had been working really hard to recruit help from around the country and around the world. And God has provided! We were looking at different venues this year for camp to house the increase in numbers. We contacted a special needs school in town and Heather spoke with and fell in love with the heart and spirit of the new lady principal there. Though we didn’t end up using it for the camp, we decided to give them a special work day. So, even though we were very tight on time with the approaching camp, we took about 40 people out to paint, clean, etc. It was sooo much fun. We had a terrific time and the principal herself was touched and blessed by the church. The principal even asked us to pray over the school as we worked so that God would bless it with a “fresh, clean start” from anything in the past. Well, the amazing thing about this story is that, as we were helping someone else, God was organizing our help! One of the guys that came over to help from our new church plant in another city mentioned our need to a Christian mission group that he worked with in Athlone: OM Ireland. Up to that point we were still short ten men and two women for our camp staff. OMI’s leader phoned a few days later and said that he’d heard about what we were doing and what we needed and then promptly committed the dozen workers we needed for the entire week of camp! Praise God! They had teams coming for the exact days and were looking for locations to send them.