Merry Christmas

Nora & I want to wish all of you a very Christ filled holiday celebration of our dear Saviors birth with your family & friends. As we all know, "Jesus is the reason for this season"! It is HIM we celebrate and the gift HE has provided to all of us who have accepted Jesus as our personal Lord & Savior.To HIM be the glory, both now, and forever!

We have been experiencing some wonderful opportunities this past week as we have seen Jesus continue to be faithful to us over & over again in so many different wonderful ways.Today, we were blessed to attend the wedding ceremony of a precious couple from our fellowship at CCMB, Jeremiah Cheatum and Angela Park who have been in our fellowship for about 2 - 3 years. We have seen our Lord bring them together to become one flesh in Jesus Christ and they made their covenant with each other for the rest of their lives to love & cherish each other, forsaking all others,& making Jesus Christ the center of their lives and marriage. The ceremony was absolutely outstanding, a most beautiful bride and a very handsome groom, but most of all seeing first hand their love for each other and their total commitment to Jesus Christ. My good friend and former Senior Pastor, Bill Holdridge, performed the ceremony and as usual did a masterful presentation of the sanctity of a marriage commitment, as they made their vows before God and the witnesses in attendance.

New news, we have now booked our flight to Africa and will be leaving from San Francisco on Monday January 26, 2009, flying to South Africa to visit our friends and fellow colleagues there, before traveling on to Malawi.The time is rapidly passing us by, with the holidays before us, then to the Missions Conference at the CC Bible College, visiting additional churches and friends in Southern California before returning to Monterey to wrap up the last of the details necessary to allow us to depart on 1-26-09.

Our fund raising is going well as we are approximately 75% completed for 2009, so please keep praying for God's provision for us. We desire to focus entirely on the ministry duties prior to departure. We are also waiting for the Malawi Embassy in Washington D.C. to respond to our inquiry regarding obtaining all the required documentation to allow us to obtain an extended multiple entry visa's. As Americans, we are allow to go and stay up to six months without any visa, but our plans are for us to live there and to come home every 12-18 months over the next 3-5 years, so this presents a different need for the visa's.

We wish to thank each of you who have already given sacrificially to our ministry efforts for Malawi, words cannot possibly express properly how much your love & support has meant to us as we have stepped out in faith to follow HIS call on our lives! You are are a vital part of this work to be done in Malawi,as you hold the rope on this side of the world as we become your eyes, hands, legs,& ears, as we listen to God's sweet voice as to what HE desires us to do upon our arrival. We think we have a handle, but we also know we know very little, so we desire to be led by HIS Holy Spirit in all we attempt to accomplish in HIS name.

May our Lord bless you all real good and always remember, HE is God and we are not!! Let us be the Ephesians 3:20 Christians who truly believe HIM to do "exceedingly, abundantly above all we can ask, think, or imagine, by the spirit that dwells in us."

Steve & Nora