AR/OK Update 6-15-20

First the sad/glad news, Leo passed from earth to heaven last week.  As many of you know, we rebuilt the home of he and his wife of 62 years.  I know that she misses him greatly, but rejoices that she’ll see him again in heaven, as will the rest of us who are part of The LORD’s family.  The last words I had with him when he was still able to talk to me was, if you get to heaven before me, tell Jesus hey!!  Please keep his family in your prayers.

We’ve had some more issue with our vehicles.  We were driving down from the mountains not too far from here and had a blowout.  A steel belt flew up and managed to put a couple of holes in a metal pipe carrying radiator fluid to the rear heater in the van.  We had a spare, but couldn’t drive without fixing the pipe.  We weren’t in a populated area but The LORD sent a lot of good Samaritans who stopped and offered help.  Kent and his nephew were among them.  They worked hard with us to help patch us up enough to get us down to the highway to a truck stop and followed us to make sure we made it that far.  Rob led us in a prayer together for them and they we’re thankful to have been able to help us.

Everything was already closed so our friend Gery came with what he had to try to help us fix the issue while another friend, Ron, came to take Mary Jo and a couple of the guys back to camp.  Rob stayed with me and he was great to have there as he knew exactly what to do to fix the issue.  Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get the correct parts so Rob and I picked them up the next morning and fixed the issue, hopefully for good!  Looks like it’s time to get new tires, they are over 8 years old, so that will be next! 

We've had a couple of issues on our trailer.  The first one we've fixed is our skylight that was leaking.  It was messy and time consuming but I was able to replace it.  Our microwave then died.  I’m in the process of trying to figure out what to do with it.  It’s a normal, under the cabinet, unit, but it isn’t clear how it is attached, certainly not like the installation manual says!  I need to take a day and work on getting it out, hopefully without damaging the cabinets.  RV cabinets are not made like home ones, so this will not be fun and will take some patience.  We know we can still get the exact replacement, but we’d like to change it so we can have a convection oven/microwave as this will better suit our needs as we are often feeding several volunteers out of our little kitchen!  It will cost more and there are height and depth restrictions as the cabinets and stove are not household sizes.  Once I get the old one out, I’ll figure out what will work and get a new one ordered and installed.  Our refrigerator is really struggling with this heat.  Yesterday it was only 44 degrees.  All 3 of our ac units in both trailers have had some issues, but so far I’ve been able to keep them going.  Trailer living is a lot of work and isn’t cheap for sure!!

We continue to press on here and are making some great progress at Ms. Reba’s.  The kitchen cabinets and countertop are installed and we’re almost finished with the flooring.  We still have a lot of trim to do once the floor is finished.  Some of the plumbing and electrical trim has been started but not finished yet. 

We had a great week with Rob, Duane, Jeff, Chris, Gery, Shay, Gray, Mary Jo and myself.  It’s really gotten hot with heat indexes almost hitting 110, but we keep pressing on!   There’s still more to do and I’m sure there will be a lot of little issues as usual as we finish up, so pray we’d finish well!

Chris, Jeff, and I will be traveling to Indianapolis early Thursday and returning late Saturday.  We’ll be hooking up with our good friend Thom from Ohio and attending a pastor’s conference.  Pray for safe traveling, we aren’t taking any of our vehicles (!) and for The LORD to speak to and refresh each of us as only He knows to do!

We’ve really been having some good devos and last week we had quite a full house, see pics.  I can express enough how important we take discipling others.  It seems as if in depth discipleship is a rarity these days even though The Bible stresses it so much.  We are always excited when folks join us locally and saddened when they don’t!  Recently we’ve had a couple of younger guys helping us while they were out of work and they really seemed to grow during their short time with us!  That’s the ONLY reason we do what we do and when that stops, I guess we’ll find another way to disciple others!

Continue to keep all of the above in your prayers as we press on!  If you'd like to help us with our finances, see the link below,

LORD Bless,

Curt & Mary Jo