About God’s plan for the founder’s life and about the founder

Judges 6:36 “And Gideon said unto God, If thou wilt save Israel by mine hand, as thou hast said, Behold, I will put a fleece of wool in the floor; and if the dew be on the fleece only, and it be dry upon all the earth beside, then shall I know that thou wilt save Israel by mine hand, as thou hast said. And it was so: for he rose up early on the morrow, and thrust the fleece together, and wringed the dew out of the fleece, a bowl full of water. And Gideon said unto God, Let not thine anger be hot against me, and I will speak but this once: let me prove, I pray thee, but this once with the fleece; let it now be dry only upon the fleece, and upon all the ground let there be dew.  And God did so that night: for it was dry upon the fleece only, and there was dew on all the ground.”
Gideon didn’t have a Bible, and it was contrary to any authority in his life except God.  What God was asking Gideon to do was crazy in the natural realm.  His father had to embarrass the religious leaders out of killing him.  When God put working with kids in Colombia in my heart it didn’t make sense to me, but He confirmed it with several signs.  One of several examples was:  I was visiting a friend from church who also happened to be an elder, and who also loved kids.  His brother-in-law stopped by with his Latina girlfriend while I was there.  When we were being introduced I asked, “Are you from Colombia?”  I couldn’t believe I had just said that because much of the world looked like her.  She said yes, I’m from Bogota and her boyfriend told me a good place to stay if I ever visit there, and avoid banks to keep from getting shot by drug cartel members.  The only news from Colombia during this time was about bombings, terrorists, kidnapping, and killing.  The only encouragement I received to pursue what God put in my heart came from the Christian businessman who had just hired me to do a project critical to the survival of his company, and was on a tight timeline to have it completed.  I had shared before he hired me about God’s call inside me, even though I hadn’t gone yet.  He wanted me to work for him anyway.  Not long after, I had to tell him that I hadn’t gotten anything done for the past two weeks because God’s call to go to Colombia was taking over my ability to concentrate on the project.  He said, “Go”, and surprised me with, “I gave you 6 weeks of vacation the day I hired you.”  When I purchased the tickets, the main drug dealer turned himself in.  When I told people that I had bought tickets, I was met with fierce anger from church, family, and a long warning call from the State Department to convince me not to go.  Matthew 10:36 says, “And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household”.  One orphanage was a worldwide Christian organization structured like a college dorm with dorm parents.  I was included in their meetings, part of which they would evaluate kids by their estimated potential to achieve positions of influence, in order to determine who would be retained past their 16th birthday.  That bothered me, but I assumed that’s how they worked.  However, the guy who ran the orphanage pulled me aside and wrote an address on a piece of paper and said, “I think this is what you are looking for.”  On it was the address of the orphanage Nuevo Amanacer. (New Dawn), so I visited there.  He had read my heart perfectly.  It was like big family with 24 kids.  Every orphanage I would encounter that exuded the love of Christ was funded by businessmen.  When I returned, I had a clear mind to work on the project.  However, immediately after, while the businessman who hired me was at a class, a business partner and team stopped in and verbally attacked me and him for having hired me, and had brought in people from IBM. (They were marketing software that was not a match for the business type.).  The next day the businessman returned, came into my office, and said, “People told me what happened yesterday.  I want you to forget yesterday ever happened.”  God enabled and used me to assemble systems, write the ERP program with finite scheduling, integrate it to accounting and EDI, and deploy it in a matter of months.  When the time for the inspection arrived, the critical owner and his team attended, glowing with anger, expecting to do a take-over after failing the final inspection.  GM was also on a mission to eliminate their smaller suppliers, which we were, and they did poorly on the previous two inspections because everything was on paper and manual.  After the inspection was completed, the inspection team addressed the entire company.  One of their comments was,  “We have never seen a system so automated, integrated, and comprehensive.  Your IT person knows how to do more than fix computers and run a network.”  As a result, GM gave them their Mark of Excellence Award, which was reserved for their top 3% of suppliers.  Not long after, the businessman bought out the critical partner and there was no longer ownership plurality.  The company went from 6 to 180 million in sales with multiple locations, with all of the stresses of growing 20% year-on-year, and where I served as CIO and CTO.  God had granted me massive concentration, creativity, and stamina to do that.  The Christian businessman trusted God with his business when he encouraged me to follow what God was speaking to me.

Proverbs 3:5-6 “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.  In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”

When God put in my heart Colombia and kids, it made no sense, and there was no well-developed Internet to research such things.  I felt foolish on the way to Colombia, saying to myself, “You idiot.  What are you thinking?  Latin families are tight.  There cannot possibly be a problem with kids there.”  I was too embarrassed to tell people on the way why I was going.  At O’Hare, when I was thinking “this is crazy” a guy flagged me down and asked if I would help him with some eye medicine.  He asked where I was going, and I told him.  He said I’m going there too.  So we walked across the airport to the gate.  He told me many things about cultural differences in the way they think.  At Miami I had to change planes.  Nobody was sitting around me as though I had leprosy.  At the last minute several people came in at sat around me.  It turned out a guy from Florida who sat across the aisle from me was bringing expiring emergency drugs from the US to be used in Colombia, and had two daughters who married the two sons of the pastor who didn’t like me for going.  (Which I didn’t mention to him.)  Another couple came in and sat behind me who turned out to be the missionaries from my church, who I had never heard of before then.  Another couple and daughter were from Muskegon, who came to teach in a school called El Camino Academy, a Christian school in Bogota.  Those are some pretty long odds on a plane with over 300 people.  When the plane landed, it was raining, and pitch dark, which I didn’t anticipate.  I had perfect peace, and was angry with myself because I should have been terrified.  All who said they would help get me on my way abandoned me, and some were staying at the house of an author whose book I had just read.  I decided to stay in the airport until morning but they closed it and forced me out in the street where it was raining and taxi drivers grabbing at my arm.  The hotel that the elder’s brother-in-law recommend and I had made reservations at, accidentally booked me for the wrong month, and I was back on the street.  After the plans I had made all fell through, I found refuge the following day in the attic of a Wycliffe Guest House.  That evening when I came downstairs they were all waiting for me and asked the dreaded question, “Why did you come?”  I felt so stupid telling them.  Then they told me about the street children, that the need was intense, and that I couldn’t visit the government offices because the president had declared it “The Week Of The Children”, so the following day they flew me to a missionary outpost near the jungle.  There, a doctor and dentist tracked me down and told me if I come they would give the kids free services, and a missionary couple with two kids said they would like to work for me.  While visiting with orphanages, I would run across the doctor three more times, each hundreds of miles from our last.  You can see him in the pictures.  After we flew back, they invited me to a picnic before school started for the year, which turned out to be where those on the plane were planning to teach.  There they introduced me to a guy working with street kids and he asked if I would like to go out with him on the streets at night, which I did, where I learned how to dodge Los Cobras who machined gunned, stabbed to death, and burned to death the street kids.  We were a more valuable target than kids for helping them, yet I had perfect peace when I should have been in terror.  (Click this Human Rights Watch article to understand.)  Following that, the couple, who were managing the guest house I was staying at, told me about a girl they talked out of having an abortion, and that was their little boy running around there.  They asked if I wanted to visit that orphanage which was run by Carlos Arreaga, which I did.  Bogota’s elevation is 8,700+ feet, but I’ve been a distance runner since age 12, so I had no trouble with oxygen when lifting 70 orphan kids to touch their backs on the ceiling, but I did sleep very well that night.  It was one thing after another.  What I didn’t know, is while I was there, ABC came there to film what was happening to the street kids, which created worldwide attention, which a customer back home videotaped for me, which I still have.  The kids were more of a blessing to me that I could be to them.  When I returned, everyone got angrier than ever when I tried to tell what God had done, except the Christian businessman, who had not yet seen the results of what he had hired me to do.

Proverbs 29:25 “The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe.”
1 Kings 13:11-24 – The old prophet told the young prophet that God told him contrary to what God told the young prophet, and the young prophet was killed by a lion.
Matthew 23:4  “For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.”
Matthew 23:9  “And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.”
Luke 11:11-13 “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?”
I am one of the young people of the church, who went to a Christian school, had to memorize scripture, heard sermons on faith, and read about the heroes of faith, so I couldn’t imagine that everyone else didn’t believe like me, and live that way.  However, as mentioned, when I stepped out in faith, they got angry.  They manipulated scripture and used intimidation.  I was torn in both directions from the scriptures.  When I was flying across country to Yellowstone Park for a family vacation when I felt I should be going to Colombia.  I listened to a couple talking about Colombia and girl there, and how they were worried about her.  It sounded like they were talking about a girl who worked at the Niños de Los Andes orphanage.  I asked, “Are you talking about Ann?”  It turned out I was sitting next to her sister and husband.  They were stunned, and I said to them, “It would kill her on the inside to be taken from what she is doing”, but I was also shook.  I met Ann in Bogota when I had a taxi drop me off at an address in the ghetto but there were no kids anywhere.  I ran after the taxi but he didn’t see me.  Then I discovered I didn’t have the address of where I was staying.  I prayed.  After approximately 30 seconds, a car stopped, and a gringo like me got out.  However, Colombia has many Europeans.  I asked if she spoke English.  She said yes in perfect English.  I asked what she was doing here.  She asked me what I was doing here.  I told her.  She said there are no kids here, that they were moved to Cajica, and asked if I had a couple hours, I said yes, and she left and went into a building.  I didn’t know what she meant, but I had forever because I didn’t have the address of where I was staying to give to a taxi.  In a few minutes she came out accompanied by a bunch of other people, and said hop in.  Being the big person, I ended up in the back seat under other people.  I learned on the way that her name was Ann, and it turned out she was the #2 person and executive secretary of the Niños de Los Andes orphanage, the one I was looking for.  Her home in the states was 35 miles from where I lived.  On the way back to Bogota that night, she asked me where I was staying.  I faked it like I lost the address, and tried to describe it as best I could.  I didn’t even know the suburb’s name where I was staying.  She said, I might know where you mean and dropped me off right where I was staying in a city of 7 million.  I couldn’t do that in a city of 250,000 I lived near for most of my life.  I returned several times and helped them set up their computer system and trained them to help them get out of audit trouble with their fund accounting, and spend time with the kids, as I did at other orphanages.

Matthew 6:21 “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
No matter how things look on the outside, life doesn’t work when your body is one place, while your heart is in another.

Proverbs 13:12 “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.”
When God gives signs like he did to Gideon, that IS a green light.  When people say wait, those are the words of men walking by sight or with an agenda.  There is no place in His Word that supports their position, so any confusion resides within them.  Delay simply makes the heart sick.  A sick heart is far more life-limiting than acting by faith and not getting everything perfect.  “Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.”

Luke 9:62 “And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”
Romans 11:29 “For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance”
I had been given so many miraculous signs that I feared Luke 9:62.  I had avoided going deep with God, hiding in a busy, surface existence, and living out other people’s expectations for my life.  That doesn’t work.  The memories of these miraculous signs never go away.  I discovered later by examining the original text that my accusers had added and taken away from the scriptures, and what God had put in my heart was according to his word.  The only thing it managed to do was to steal my joy and excitement, and damage my relationship with God.  This was simply dying an inch at a time.  I learned it is better to be a man of no reputation and walk with God in faith than to be imprisoned by a reputation based on man’s approval.  There is no mistake I can make while following Him, that can be more crippling to my life than the fear of man and other people’s expectations defining my path in life.  I wasn’t sure what He thought of me, and was almost afraid to ask.  He gave me multiple miraculous signs that showed He does.  I wish I could show you the pictures, the documents, and you could talk to the people to confirm what I said, but here is something I can prove to you here.  While I was praying, God spoke ChristsLove.org to my heart.  My logical inclination was that is not possible.  A domain like that would have been gone in the first month of public Internet.  It just kept running through my mind and I couldn’t think to get anything done, so I went online to where I keep my domain names to check just to get it off my mind.  The name had never been claimed, so I bought it.  I was puzzled when the same thing happened a few weeks later.  As I reflected on it, I thought I wonder if it is available in Spanish or French.  Neither had ever been claimed so I bought both.  Ask any webmaster what the odds of domain names like them having never been claimed at this late date.  Following His leading, I created this web site to be accessible from all three languages.

Luke 18:29-30  “And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children, for the kingdom of God’s sake,  Who shall not receive manifold more in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting.”
Even if this promise were not in the Bible, it wouldn’t change anything for me.  God has put it in my heart to be a father to the fatherless, and the love of kids and people has been part of my DNA since I was a child.  Just feeling Christ’s love flow my heart into theirs is already “Manifold more”, and a huge pressure relief for me.

Matthew 19:24 “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” 
There has long been an unconscious desire to not be rich that has played out no matter how much money I received.  I’m happy to go with whatever God wants, including nothing at all.  It is also the very reason why I always backed away from great, but entangling, business opportunities.

Joel 2:25  “And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.”
Isa 40:30-31  “Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall:  But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”
I have no right to ask for these verses to be fulfilled in my life after my delays, except through Christ who makes me perfect in God’s sight.  I also pray that the childlike trust, joy, and excitement also be restored to full vigor.

Psalm 84:10  “For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.”
God created me with the need for puke, dirty diapers, skinned knees, skinned hearts, to wipe tears away, for holding, and hugging, and for reasons only He knows, forced me into aviation and afterward made a military pilot out of me, plus business and technology in many fields.  I did not have control over most of these events in my life, nor do I understand how God will use those pieces.  If I wrote a book about how all of those things happened, it would be filed in the comedy section.  My greatest need and God’s unequivocal call is to have the love of Christ flow through me to these kids and other people.

Orphanage and kids
What you can expect of me is for the kids experience the love of Christ, and come to know God as their coach and minute by minute companion.  To learn to read God’s word with the mindset of a God who shows us what does, and what doesn’t work in life, and the bad areas as Him cutting out cancer from society that prevents people from living fulfilled lives.  That the Bible was written to help them get the most out of life, that Jesus made possible, and God can make happen, when they put their confidence in Him.   I have witnessed firsthand how destroyed these kids can be when they arrive.  Today there is video chat so people in the US could visit with the kids.  After their healing, I hope to have people in the states who can recognize families that walk by faith for kids to spend time with.  I know how rare those families are.  I know how expensive adoptions are.  Perhaps people can band together to help households of faith take them in as exchange students or adoption.  From what I’ve seen, they will be a far greater blessing to the adopting family, than they will be to them.

About the founder:
1 Corinthians 1:27 says, “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;”  That’s me.  I made it from grade to grade through my dad’s persuasive skills.  I was terribly curious about how things worked, and studied that, not what was being taught.  I studied cars, electronics, physics, etc.  I could fix cars that dealers couldn’t figure out before I could drive, and designed an electronic system for a produce distributor to inform him on weekends when a cooler broke down.  A marine sniper taught me how to shoot.  My dream was to work at the Big Top budget grocery store, and be their maintenance man who also drives the truck early in the morning to pick up produce from local farmers.  I was devastated when they fired me for not packing grocery bags to protect the eggs, which was false, and they could cite no incidence.  I was terrified by anything higher than a step ladder and told my best friend that he was crazy to join the civil air patrol.  I got car sick, boat sick,, and when the military wanted me to go somewhere, I told them I would buy my own train tickets but they forced me to fly, so I also got air sick.  I did too well on a test to become a truck mechanic so they made me an aircraft mechanic, where I also did a little too well and they made me a mechanic supervisor and to fly with them.  I was always sick, so they put me in the cockpit to fly so I wouldn’t get sick as fast.  One day a pilot said to me, “I was just like you.  It took learning to fly to get over it.”  It was expensive, but a guy approached me a week later and asked if I wanted to buy the maintenance share of an airplane where I could get some free time for maintaining it, but I had to take the flight time every month, which forced me to fly.  After a while I was more at ease in the air than driving.  Then my previous flight instructor got me into aerobatics.  After graduating from an academy for the guard, they asked me what I wanted to do.  I laughingly said, go to flight school.  The non-aviation major, ignorant of such things, said, “It should work.”  What he didn’t know is it was a bit of a joke because the guard hadn’t had funding to send someone to school since the Korean War.  A sergeant said, “You should put in for flight school”, so I took the test and must have done well because I was interviewed like countless others over the decades had done, all who went nowhere.  Then they gave me a temporary command of a headquarters full of officers that outranked me, which is a crazy thing to do with a lieutenant.  Others dreaded commands but I loved it, solved a lot of issues, and had fun with the people doing it.  While I was there, they referred to me as “doer” and “preacher”.  Doer might make sense but I never preached.  They saw me as approachable, and came to me for advice for some unknown reason.  After 20+ years they received funding for an officer to go to flight school.  They picked another guy, who decided to leave the guard and go active after he was there, so then they decided to send me to “fright” school, the first for Michigan since the Korean War.  Afterwards, a guy wanted to show me his die shop.  When he was showing me around, the general manager said to me, “I look forward to working with you.”  I wasn’t there to get a job, I was going back to college.  I ended up working as an apprentice in a die shop where die makers work on commission.  Nobody wanted me to work for them for good reason, so they laid off their least valuable first, me.  I immediately went out and bought a prototype car body from Ford, and was making up parts in the shop to put a diesel engine in it, when the general manager approached me and said, “We would like you to automate our die shop.”  They want to put the guy who doesn’t know what he is doing in charge of developing processes to plan and automate the processes for everyone’s dies???  One day I was preparing a die for the die maker who hated me the worst, but they hadn’t told him yet he would be getting that die.  While the machine was running and I was doodling on a piece of paper with a risky concept, I heard the voice of the general manager behind me, “I know what you are thinking, do it!”  I turned around I replied, “No way.  Especially not this die that has to be within six-tenths of a thousandths.  There will be blood on the floor…mine.”  He said I’ll handle him.  I did mathematical guesses which had always been done by experimentation.  They assigned the die, the die maker blew up when he saw what I was doing, the general manager handled it, but the die maker was flushed with anger.  It worked out extremely well and soon die makers loved me because of the money they made.  Apprentices got paid about the same as car wash employees.  The first baby came, and I didn’t want day care.  She said that is impossible.  Within a week, the military wanted me to do quality assurance before acceptance on the flight controls of F14, F15, F16, and AV-8B Harriers, and it paid way more.  I accepted but worked at night to not leave the die shop in lurch.  One night the general manager and president startled me when I thought I was alone, and wanted to talk.  In 15 minutes my wages went from car-wash employee to more than an airline captain, plus overtime, plus I didn’t have to drive 2 hours a day, and still granted me my journeyman die maker.  Later, the president and general manager wanted to talk alone with me.  They informed me that their production plant was bankrupt and the only reason they still had it was they owed more than people could buy the machinery new for, installed, and with a warranty.  I said, “That’s too bad that you are losing it.”  Then they said, “You don’t understand.  The die shop is on the same note.  If there is anything you can do for us…”  What???  I didn’t know where the place was, nor how it operated, nor accounting.  Those talking to me started it, and they had a full-time accountant.  I knew little about computers and they had no money.  In those days, building a computer was not buying parts at Best Buy.  I made the enclosure from a kitchen base cabinet, and hacked in a VCR to do backups.  I had to invent and write the file system to store and index the data, and maintenance routines to detect data errors and fix them automatically when possible.  I never had written any business program, and I didn’t know where to start, because I didn’t know what they did.  Yet, in 5 months it was operational, data loaded, and ran a report that showed the president that he had $605,000 worth of steel that people had ordered when stocks were low, but had no future orders for.  He got faint.  The first year afterward, they made a little over a million in net profit.  The president of their large accounting firm asked to spend time with me personally, and taught me about ratios, so I designed reports to give him that.  He uncovered that the production manager and secretary built their houses on company money.  The ownership changed, and so did their treatment of people.  They were nice to me, but watching was hard on me, so I decided to start a business.  Another guy did too, said he had tried business twice before and failed but said he couldn’t sell.  I did, and God grew both of us into 6 figures in a year.  If you take from that I must be quite a salesman you would be so wrong.  God just made it happen.  He was the one with the skills, so he bought me out, but I kept the patent.  I started another business after that, and the businessman who encouraged me to go to Colombia started as a customer.  He had heard what I had done at the other manufacturer.  I discovered that he hadn’t had a backup in four months of his accounting system, and his time and attendance and payroll took 3 ½ days plus sent the information to an outside vendor.  This was unfathomable to me, so I put in a time clock network, software, and wrote an interface to their accounting and it went to 55 minutes, and all done in-house.  He wanted me to work for him, so I did.  When I overheard people saying things about me that I am not, I would pull out my report cards from school to prove God dragged me all of these places and was the sole enabler, and to get a clue from 1 Corinthians 1:27 who God uses, so that people understand He is the only place where the power could have come from.  Later, I left and started a business for the same reason I had left a previous one.

When I signed the oldest daughter up for college, on the way home I asked, why she decided on teacher instead of doctor, as she always played both.  She said because she couldn’t do blood and guts and was no good at math.  I prodded her thoughts with, “It’s a good thing you weren’t this smart when you were little because you would be in a wheel chair.  You were no good at walking either.  That is making a decision based on your fears and abilities.  Ask the Lord what He would have you do.”  Sunday night two days later, I heard a quivering voice around the corner about how she wanted to change colleges to do that.  A long time later she stopped in to eat to tell me about a how the coroner said the lady died of a heart attack, but when they got into her brain they found it was an aneurism.  Then she had to leave and I asked, “What’s the rush?  She said the college hired me to be a math tutor”.  Then it hit me.  I said, “This isn’t the girl I knew a year ago.”.   Then it hit her what God had done in her life.  Apparently kids talk because the table fell silent.  The other kids now had a much bigger problem now.  Instead of 3 or 4 things they thought they could do, it was now about 10,000, and I never had to listen to what they couldn’t do again.  I want to do this with orphan kids.

This brings me to today.  I have no idea what I’m doing developing ChristLove either, but as you might expect I’ve become accustomed to that.  There should be little doubt in your mind by now that God smote people around me with the spirit of insanity to ask me to do things that I had no idea how to do nor should they have had any expectation that I could.  I have been too young, too old, or wildly unqualified to even apply for everything I’ve done.  As you can imagine, this kept my conversations with God lively because I surely didn’t have anything to bring to the mix.  He made the impossible happen every time, and fortunately I wasn’t smart enough to realize how impossible it was until after the fact.  I hope that is something you will use.  The heroes in my life are Mother Theresa, Mariella Bernal of Nuevo Amanecer who has no match for imparting the love of Christ to kids, Jaime Jaramillo of Ninos de Los Andes, who has rescued nearly 100,000 from the streets between December, 1973 and April 2018 and sets aside a night to call the kids around the world, and Carlos Arreaga who found Christ’s love and went from pimp to the orphanage father of 70 kids while I was there, and was used by God to transform prostitutes into humble, God-spirited helpers with the kids.  I’ve seen God’s power and how He has done things in my life that were way beyond what I had the capacity to know what to ask for or imagine.  Romans 11:29 says, “For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.”  E.G. It never goes away.  Ephesians 2:10  “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.”  My greatest peace and blessings have come when doing what God asked me to do that was beyond crazy from everyone’s perspective.  Hebrews 11 contains people who did what God asked them to do even when it didn’t make sense, and He tells some of the most unlikely people to do them.  Proverbs 3:5-6 “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.  In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”  My greatest disasters came from leaning on my own understanding even when scriptural, and the fear of man to fit with people’s expectations and support.  That is the voice of the thief, no matter who it comes from.  I believe according to the scripture but very differently than most people.  If you have peace with what you are doing, “don’t rock the boat”.  You are right where God wants you.  When you know God wants you somewhere else, peace and enthusiasm will be elusive.  It would be a little tough for someone like me to convince God I didn’t do something because I didn’t know He would be there for me.  No matter what happens, I am not willing to be constrained to a life of, “No runs, no hits, and no errors.” and my need is, and always has been, to bring as much Heaven to earth as I can with my life.

The Founder’s Prayer:
Pray God’s help in me separate myself from entanglements that slow me from pursuing God’s calling.  Pray that the peace and joy and energy will increase even further.  I pray that He restore everything the locusts have eaten, and that I not miss anything He wanted me to accomplish, nor be robbed of a single blessing.  I pray for guidance whether I should learn from Jaime, Mariella, the couples in Cartagena  who also didn’t know the language, or God Himself as He forced me to do most times, such as the first time to Colombia when He trashed the feeble plans I had made, and set me on a path that was far more than I could know what to ask and unable to imagine, and every physical miracle.  Pray that He bless my language learning skills that seem to only come when I need them.  Pray for provision.  My needs are simple; soap, shampoo, toothpaste, toothbrush, a couple changes of clothes, and just enough food to enable me to take care of them.  The larger needs will be for the kids, for a place to house them, feed them, and help them find their creator as their closest friend and integral to walking out their calling.  Jaime gets donations from around the world, but now also makes cookies that are sold through grocery stores.  It assists with financial stability for his organization, and provides employment.  Please pray all of this happens for the kids’ sake and mine, otherwise I will have spent my life running from some wild business opportunities for nothing in return.