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A Testimony of God's Miraculous Provision and Protection I used to wonder why so many years passed before the gospels were actually written down. I think I know now. When you look back upon the years you’ve lived from the mountain of the present, what you notice the most in the landscape of your memories are the peaks; those features in your view that stand out the most. This is what we see in the gospels. We have four gospels relating the peaks, the most important elements, otherwise the Bible would have to be written in multiple volumes. The same principle of the peaks operates in our testimony. I’m going to be sharing what stands out the most – otherwise we’ll be camping here overnight. What we need to remind ourselves when we are enduring the trials of this life, is that the supernatural God of miracles that we see so abundantly illustrated for us in the Old and New Testaments, is the same God of miracles that is on our side at this present moment of time. He is still parting the red sea for His children, which today could also manifest in a miraculous parting of rush hour traffic, which has happened to us on multiple occasions. |
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My husband and I would never have learned to trust God in the way we do now, if we had not been allowed to experience the things we did. All things really do work together for good to them who love God and are the called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28).
This journey of trust and also character development began when we sold our business on Long Island, New York, and moved to New England. My husband had led me to the Lord four months before we were married in 1968. Shortly afterward, my father died, and we moved from our apartment in New York City to Long Island to run his business with my mother. It was a difficult nine years. My mother had many emotional problems and as we learned later, there was a strong demonic element involved that we didn’t know how to deal with at the time. We were relieved when the business was sold and we could escape to the peaceful tranquility of the New England woods. We bought our dream house, a two bedroom cottage perched on a granite ledge, with cute diamond pane windows and a beautiful stone fireplace. Except for the blackflies and mosquitoes we thought our home was the closest thing you could get to paradise on this planet. |
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In the solitude we began to draw closer to the lord, which was His plan. He was beginning to call us into ministry. My husband turned his art over to the Lord and I became immersed in studying God’s word. I remember reading passages in scripture that were complicated to me, like some of the Old Testament prophecies found in Ezekiel and being fed the meaning of them in my spirit. Then I’d be watching a pastor on television say the same things that I had learned directly from the Lord. This happened over and over again. After two years in our new home, which we had completely renovated, we went into a lobster wholesaling business with another couple we had met in the next town. Don was a new Christian and because he had done such a remarkable job in restoring the local lobster co-op, the bank manager suggested that he start his own business. He asked us if we would mortgage our house to help him. We thought it was a good idea at the time. We were looking for ways to fund our ministry, so we agreed. We had not grown enough in our relationship with the Lord to pray first. The business took off immediately. But when it did, Don’s personality changed. He became prideful and abusive to his wife and children. Then the business would go down. Don repented and the business went up again. He repeated his previous behavior. The business went down again, Don repented again, and the business went up. He didn’t learn a thing. He once again turned into a monster and this time, it was if the Lord was saying, “Three strikes and you are out, Don.” This time the business never recovered. It was an extremely stressful time for us, but at the same time, we were wanting to launch out into our ministry. I remember that when we first went into the business I said to my husband, “If the Lord wants to move us, He’ll use this.” Somehow I knew I could not leave my house in paradise unless I was forcibly shoved from the nest. | New Book! |
| We put our house up for sale and moved back to Kansas where my husband was from, into a basement apartment in my mother-in-law’s house. It was very difficult living in that situation, but we busied ourselves preparing for what the Lord was leading us to do for Him. We were planning on using my husband's Christian art as an outreach and witness in the secular art shows in the malls. We had some of his art printed in Kansas. Then we eventually bought a used truck and travel trailer. We needed a loan for both of them and at the time the economy was really bad and none of the banks were loaning any money. We were being turned down everywhere we applied. Then a friend suggested we try a credit union. We applied and we got the loan immediately. My husband's brother, who was a businessman, was amazed.
I had to sell off my treasured antiques to get the down payment for the trailer. I had gorgeous clocks, a Persian rug that had belonged to my grandparents, a prized collection of American Indian pottery. We sold it all to dealers for whatever we could get. At the same time I had a dream that I was flying freely singing, “All you need is Jesus.” My materialism was being stripped away like ballast on a balloon. We had previously done a few shows in Kansas and Texas before we had the trailer. We had to stay in motels which wasn’t very cost effective. Our first show was in Hurst Texas. I was nervous about how we would be received because we had such a bold witness for the Lord. To our surprise, the spot we were assigned was right across from a Christian bookstore. The promoter didn’t know it was there and I’ll always remember the look on her face when she looked at the store and then back at our display. She was amazed at the “coincidence.” And for additional encouragement, both artists on either side of us, a jeweler and a woodworker, were both strong Christians. We had a wonderful time. At last we were ready to begin our journey to California where the weather would allow us to work year round. Before we left Kansas for California, we decided to be re-baptized. My husband and I had both grown so much in the Lord, we wanted to rededicate ourselves to Him. We had become friends with a pastor and his wife and Roger agreed to baptize us and a new friend who was visiting us who had come to the Lord through one of our outreaches at a mall in Kansas. We went to the Arkansas River. Roger baptized our friend, then me and then my husband. Then Roger came out of the river and went over to me. He asked, “Did you feel anything when you were in the water?" I said, “No, just wet.” He said, “When I dipped you back into the water, I lost hold of you. When I reached in to pull you out, there was so much electricity in the water I couldn’t, it burned my hands. “ He should me his hands, there were two red welts across both of his palms. Everyone watching on the shore said I rose up straight out of the water, which is impossible to do when you are off your feet. I thought someone was lifting me. This was an amazing miracle. I then proceeded to experience one of the hardest years of my life. There was a particular scripture that always magnified to me when I was back in my Bible school in the woods. It was from Psalm 18. “He took me. He drew me out of many waters.” God literally did that for me. I would learn that whatever I was going through, He would pull me out of those waters, too. I remember when I was back in New England in my beautifully furnished dream house, I was experiencing a bout of boredom. I remember sitting in my livingroom, and I said to the Lord, “I need an adventure.” I realize now, that I should have been more specific. I should have prayed, “I need an adventure in a luxury hotel in Hawaii.” I gave Him much too much leeway. We finally arrived in California, broke, exhausted, scared, not knowing where to stay. We were technically homeless. Our house which refused to sell, was given back to the bank because we couldn’t afford those payments with the camper. The ministry had to come first. I was very stressed at the time and experiencing a tremendous amount of insecurity as my trust buttons were just starting to be developed, that was the point of the whole experience I am sure now. I woke up one morning in a parking lot with a severe pain in my chest. It would come in waves and subside. We had no money for doctors. I just prayed until it went away. I think it was a stress related spasm in my esophagus. I never had it since, but it was scary. When we landed in California, it was in the Ventura area and God had engineered us to the only campground we could barely afford. It was a parking strip along the highway called the Rincon. There were no facilities, just a parallel parking space right on the ocean and we could camp there for four dollars per night. We loved it there. It was the water, the beach, the rocks and our camper. We’d really enjoyed watching the surfers. One time I saw a dolphin swim right under a surfer as he rose up on the crest of a wave. People would swim out to pet the whales when they swam by. One evening we were watching a glorious sunset from our bedroom window when we heard the sound of a professionally played bagpipe play “Amazing Grace. “ We looked out and saw a man standing on the rocks facing that awesome sky, praising God in his way. We met him the next morning. He was part of a travelling folk group, the McNeil family that had stopped there for the night. We were just beginning to track down art shows we could do. We were really broke so we decided to sell my husband's prints to the churches which we had done before in Kansas. We weren’t doing very well this time. Then I saw a Salvation Army. They help people so I tried there. I showed the prints to the director. He said one of them matched the message that was given in the chapel service that morning. He bought all of them and we could eat. One of those prints was the first painting my husband did of Jesus smiling. Years later after we had left California and we were ministering in another state, a young woman came up to us and said she recognized that print. She was being helped by the Salvation Army and saw the print there. She told us that it had been a tremendous comfort to her at that time. We were really blessed and encouraged to get that feedback from some of the seeds we had left in our wake. We finally got into the art show circuit in California. One of our first services was at a big mall in Pasadena. We arrived in a parking lot where we could stay across from the mall. My husband was tired from the drive so he decided not to unhitch until morning. When we got inside we realized that because of the angle we couldn’t lock the door, so we roped it to a drawer handle and went to bed. We woke up around two o’clock in the morning and we heard a deep voice say, “You is being robbed!” We looked out the window and we could see some men moving around on the other side of the fence in the construction yard next door. This was in the days before everyone had cell phones so we couldn’t call the police, so we just prayed hoping God would keep them on the other side of the fence. We’ve camped in neighborhoods where they were shooting people and gunshots were common. We were grateful for the Lord’s protection. I had friends in a traveling ministry where a drive by shot through the window of their camper and the bullet was deflected supernaturally into the floor or it would have hit the minister in his bed. Exhausted, the next morning we hauled our stuff into the elevator in the mall and set up on the second level. Now at these events we were not allowed to distribute literature outside of our table. We could have it at our display, but we couldn’t hand anything out in the mall. We always had a basket filled with little Bible verse salvation booklets that people could take for free. This little boy came up to our display and took one of the booklets. I didn’t see his parents anywhere. He must have been around seven or eight years old. He took the booklet, walked into the aisle and promptly handed it to a woman who was walking by. She thanked him and took it from him smiling. Who wouldn’t take a little book from a cute little boy? Then he came back to the table and looked at me. I scooped up a handful of the Bibles, he held out his hands and I loaded him up. He promptly disappeared into the crowd distributing those books where we could not. I think he was an angel. We were doing one art show after another. We had just finished an event in Orange County and we were scheduled to be at another event in Fresno right away, so we had to make the big trip from the southern part of the state to the north very quickly. We were going to take the route called the grapevine though a mountain range. We decided to travel that night, so after the event my husband hitched up, but when he tested the signal lights, all the lights on the truck and the trailer began to flash alternately like lights on a Christmas tree. We couldn’t signal any turns so we had to stay the night in the parking lot. The next day, everything was working fine. We went to an RV repair shop and I told the repairman what the lights were doing. He told me our vehicles were not wired to do what I said they were doing. He checked everything and there was nothing wrong with the lights, but he discovered that our trailer brakes were not working. Our camper was a big, heavy fifth wheel and there was no way we could have kept that camper from pushing us off a mountain with no trailer brakes. God supernaturally protected us from disaster by causing our lights to malfunction. His supernatural protection for us was a major trust builder. Another time we were staying at a campground in Ojai. The trailers were very close together, with barely enough parking space for our truck right next to our neighbor’s trailer. Around four one afternoon, we decided to take a break from our work and go out for some coffee. When we came back about an hour later, there were fire trucks all over the campground. Shortly after we had left, our neighbor’s camper had caught fire and a propane tank had blown up. If our car had been there, it would have caught fire and we could have been trapped in the trailer. Another time years later, we were camping by a river in New York State. I was in the camper and my husband was sitting on a metal lawn chair looking at the water. It was a cloudy day, but there was no sign of a storm. Then he heard the Still Small Voice of the Lord say, “Get up and go into the house NOW!” He immediately obeyed. The minute he came in and closed the door everything outside turned pure white. A lightning bolt had struck right by the camper. If he had remained in that chair, he could have been killed or badly injured. It really pays to obey the Lord when He tells you to do something. My mother actually came to the Lord watching Him move us around severe weather patterns. Speaking of weather, we were camping in Santa Ana and there was a really bad storm coming. I had never seen a sky that black before. We were getting scared so we went outside and prayed like little children. "Oh, Lord, please make this storm go away!” Then to our surprise we watched as those storm clouds slowly began to dissipate. When we turned on the radio we heard the weather lady say, “Mother nature is playing tricks on us.” The storm had been showing on the radar and it just disappeared. God’s financial miracles for us were just as astounding. We usually worked with the same promoters and they knew us pretty well. So I gave a bad check for the sixty dollar fee to the promotor of a show we were doing. I told him to please not deposit it until the end of the show. After four days in a mall we would be able to cover the check as we had always been able to do in the past – except for this time. We were not selling a thing. It was coming up to the end of the event and I was really stressed that the check was going to bounce and we’d lose our credibility. Then just before closing, a man came up to our display. He was a Christian and he really like my husband's print of Jesus smiling. We were selling them for $14.98. He told us he wanted to buy it and he was going back to his car to get his checkbook. I thought, well, if he comes back, at least we’ll be able to buy a few groceries. He did come back and he had the strangest look on his face. He said, “The Lord told me to give you one hundred dollars.” I said ecstatically, “Yes He did!” I explained to him our situation and he got tears in his eyes. He was really moved that God had used Him to help us. He became a good friend. Whenever our car would break down, there was always an auto mechanic who would show up and fix us for free. One time when our car needed an $800 repair we couldn’t afford the owner of the campground we were staying in who was a Christian gave us two thousand dollars. He said the Lord had told him there were people He wanted him to help and he knew it was us. God was building our faith with every miracle of His protection and provision. We finally made it to that art show in Fresno I mentioned earlier. It was around Christmas time, and this particular show had been going on for almost a month in an empty store the promoter had rented. We were coming in for the last week and things had not been going well. Sales were off. One of the artist’s wives had almost died and there was an overall atmosphere of gloom and complaining. When we first arrived in the parking lot I had a mental vision of a dark, faceless figure, it startled me. That night I saw it in a dream. In the dream the Lord said, “You can’t cast it out, praise Me.” I didn’t understand what was going on. My experience with spiritual warfare at that point was almost non-existent, except for one incident when we first moved into our house in New England. My husband woke up in the middle of the night, paralyzed. He felt something crawl up his chest and begin to strangle him. He was almost about to pass out when he cried "Jesus!" in his mind and the thing left. Since then we’ve heard other testimonies from people, including a missionary in Africa that had had similar experiences. When that happened we filed it in the basement of our thoughts hoping we would never have to deal with anything like that again. I tried to do the same thing after the dream and vision I had in Fresno. Because I knew the promoter so well by that time, he allowed me to bring in some Gospel singers for the event. He knew I was a strong Christian and he asked me a bit nervously, “It’s going to be Christmas music, isn’t it?” I said, “It’s all Christmas music!" He trusted me anyway. I called some churches and found some singers who were willing to come, a mother, her teenage daughter and her daughter’s friend. They did a great job and the promoter was very pleased. When it was all over, the mother came over to me and said, “There is a large dark figure standing by the door.” I had never said a word to her about what I had seen. God had let her see it. We prayed together, rebuking it in the name of Jesus and she said it instantly disappeared in flash of light. Since then our education in this area has been largely expanded, which would be enough for another full testimony. We had long since moved from our idyllic oceanside campground at the Rincon, but not willingly. Our forced relocation began when we were doing an art show in Orange County. I was coming back to our display through the appliance section in a department store and I stopped to listen to an interview on television. That’s when I learned that they were planning to shut down our beloved Rincon campground. There were two affluent neighborhoods on either side of the parking strip along the ocean that was our home. They were interviewing one of the disgruntled residents who was complaining about the campers. He said, “I deeply resent the fact that they can have this view for only four dollars a night when I have to pay all these taxes.” I could hardly believe what I was hearing. He had a big beautiful house with indoor plumbing and hot and cold running water. I was living next to a family whose only home was a tent trailer. They had to tie plastic over it to keep their kids warm at night. He was jealous and resentful of the poor? The campground was closed. The next almost affordable option for us was the state parks. The rent then was ten dollars a night, but the sites had water and electricity and an onsite dump station, profound luxuries. There were a lot of homeless families and individuals, who like us, were trying to survive in those places. The rents then were very high and getting higher. Today they are astronomical. I have a friend in California. She pays a thousand dollars a month for a one bedroom and she was told that’s cheap rent. The average now in Los Angeles is $2,000 per month. I met a Christian woman at a show we were doing who told us she didn’t qualify for the income based housing because she didn’t have children. Then she had a stroke from working so many jobs just to keep a roof over her head. That got her into a cheaper apartment, and thank God it was there for her, but it was quite a price to get one. The campgrounds were filling up with homeless and instead of trying to help them, the state began changing the rules of the parks to try and get rid of them. You could only stay two weeks in any park in the same county. Then you had to leave for a month. We could work around it because our work was in different parts of the state, but the working poor could not. It was tough and on top of that, in one park we stayed in that was near an affluent neighborhood, the offspring of the rich would often come into the campground and harass the homeless there. When we were staying near Santa Barbara, we learned about one young man from a wealthy neighborhood who brutally beat a streetman to death just because he wanted to. He received a whopping six month sentence for cold blooded murder. Is the value of life in the United States determined by the size of a bank account? God’s loves people no matter what their station in life is. We were sitting in a fast food restaurant when a man came up to us and asked us if we knew anyone who needed some money. I certainly did, us, and he handed us a twenty dollar bill and sat down to share his story. His name was Charlie Lundy, former president of the Lundy aircraft corporation. His girlfriend was a Christian and he was trying to talk her out of her Christian faith. One day they were climbing a mountain together. They almost made it to the top, when the sky opened up above his head, a light poured down. He told us that every hair on his body stood straight up and he heard a voice say, “Charlie, you are going to serve Me, and so that you’ll know it’s Me, at the end of thirty days, you’re not going to have any money.” At the time he had five million dollars. How could he lose all that money in thirty days? Well, unbeknownst to Charlie, his ex-wife had gotten together with his attorney and turned Charlie’s Swiss bank account into the IRS. At the end of thirty days from his encounter with God on that mountain, Charlie was broke. He became a Christian, married his girlfriend and when we met him they were living in a travel trailer helping street people. He told us he had met highly skilled professional people living under bridges. Homelessness can happen to anyone. There are more scriptures concerning God’s care for the poor than any other moral issue in the Bible. If it is a major issue in God’s word, then it should be a major issue in our hearts as well. We wanted to illustrate this fact, so my husband began drawing street people and we incorporated them into our outreach. Then God started changing our direction. The art shows in California were winding down. It was harder for the promoters to book malls. We started cleaning houses as a way to supplement our income. At the same time the Lord was leading us to begin ministering in the churches. It was also getting harder for our old truck to pull the heavy camper and we desperately needed a more permanent place to stay. Then someone told us about a mobile home park that had a few RV parking spaces. We went there to apply and we were told that there was a waiting list of twenty-five people ahead of us. We filled out the application anyway. When I checked back with them a few days later, we were told that we had the spot. We were rejoicing. We learned later that when we came in to apply, the owner of the park, a little old lady, happened to be in the office and overheard our situation. She told the manager to give us the spot, she felt sorry for us because we had to clean houses. We moved in and we didn’t know it at the time, but that would be the last time we would be hauling our big fifth wheel. The Lord had shown us that our sojourn in California was coming to an end. He was leading us to return to New England. We had a half acre next to the house we lost. We were planning to use that land as a camper lot base and work up and down the East Coast moving with the weather. In order to do that, we needed to get a smaller lighter trailer that our truck could handle on the long journey ahead. The only one we could find that we could afford was a seventeen footer. They count the hitches when they measure these things, so that meant we would have only about fourteen feet of living space. We had been living in a twenty-seven foot trailer. I thought I could make the adjustment. We found a buyer for our old trailer, and it sold. I really liked that trailer, it had been our home for seven years. Moving day was traumatic for me. I actually had a harder time than when I lost my house. Trying to find room for everything was stressful. After we finally got everything in the camper and the shell we had purchased for the back of our truck, which later became my husband's studio, I was crying. I had to call a local prayer line and that helped me to be able to move in. We launched off in the shuttle and we ended up living in that camper for another seven years. We actually came to enjoy it. It had large wrap around windows and when we were staying in a beautiful place it was awesome. I learned a lot about how God wants us to be able to adapt to change. He wants us to be flexible. It’s so important to be able to move with Him for His purposes and sometimes our protection. Moving from camper to camper and place to place, changing our work and direction was one of the ways He used to make us pliable in His hands. We have since gone through a total of five campers and lived in them over thirty-five years before we finally got an apartment. We launched out of California with $400 to our name, with the intention of booking churches as we went. I was new at this and didn’t know that most churches book up way in advance and it would be impossible for us to work the way I saw it at the time. But God is a God of miracles and we were able to get work even though I didn’t know it was impossible. But it was difficult booking from telephone booths. One day in Arizona I had a breakdown in a telephone booth. I wailed to the Lord, “I can’t do this anymore. I need an office!” The next call I made, the pastor I was talking to learned we were working our way back East and our next stop was Texas. He had just returned from a conference and had met a pastor from Texas and gave me his number. I called him and without even having to ask, he invited me to use his office in his church so I could book from there. If this yet another miracle from God had not have happened, I would have remained collapsed in a telephone booth in Arizona. Every time I booked, my husband was always praying. Without that I don’t think we would have done as well as we did. One time while I was booking, he asked the Lord to have one of the pastor’s mention the Holy Spirit as a confirmation that we were in His will. The pastor I was talking to suddenly said, “I can feel the Holy Spirit as you are talking to me” and he booked us right away. When I told my husband he was really blessed God had confirmed our mission so readily. What was our mission? When we first started in the malls our goal was to try and bring as many people we could to the Lord. Although we planted a multitude of seeds, the people we actually ministered to the most, were what I call “religious victims.” These were people who were never able to enter into any relationship with the Lord at all because of some bad experiences they’d had with religion, or faith without love. When we brought our Gospel presentation back into the churches, we actually had more first time commitments to Jesus than we did with our outreach. After we were able to return to the East Coast, our old truck was nearing the end of his days. We were on our second engine, a rebuilt one that was donated and we had three hundred thousand miles on his body. We’d named him Patches because of the black rust treatment spots all over his aging frame. We painted him with rustolium and sold him when we got our new van. We couldn’t afford a new car, but we bought him anyway at the Lord’s leading. We had a lot of demonically inspired insecurity about being able to make those payments on our not so steady love offering income. The Lord knew we needed some reassurance. One day when my husband was washing down our beautiful new van, he thought to himself, “This car would look great with a white sports stripe.” He didn’t even tell me he wanted a spots stripe. We had to take the van back to the dealer to get some scratches polished out that were on it when we bought it. We dropped it off and went to a restaurant. When we came back there was a white sports stripe on our car. The man who put it on went back three times to verify we had ordered that stripe that we never ordered. I said, “Do we have to pay for it?” “No, not if you didn’t order it.” So we drove home with a sports stripe on our car absolutely amazed. Shortly after that, a pastor we met gave us a check for two thousand dollars. He said that was only the second time that God has told him to do something like that. Needless to say we were greatly encouraged. It wasn’t easy, but after seven long years we were able to pay off our car, and whenever we had hard times we’d look at that sports stripe that began by just a thought read by the Wind. We learned to rest in the fatherhood of God. He wants to take care of us, He wants His children to relate to Him as a loving Father. Although He wants us to grow in our relationship with Him, He always wants us to retain a humble childlike dependence upon Him. In that respect He does not want us to grow out of that parent child relationship. He wants to be a perpetual parent, because He enjoys it. His Spirit is very nurturing. Because He is love, love must nurture. When Jesus said He wanted to gather His people as a hen with her chicks, this shows us the protective, mothering nature of God. It grieves the Lord when like rebellious teenagers we pull away determined to avoid His parental guidance and the loving shelter of his wings. I believe that one of the reasons He has taken such good care of us all these years is because we were so totally dependent on Him like little children. He wants to affirm to His people that He is a God of miracles and when we let go and trust Him with everything, He will prove Himself over and over again as He did with us. When we realize that it is His will that we all minister the gospel whenever and wherever we can and when we put His kingdom first above our own personal desires, He abundantly fulfills us in ways we can’t imagine. We are living in the last days and there will be many challenges to our faith as we continue to move forward on this conveyor belt of time. We must keep our eyes focused on Jesus and our destiny with Him in heaven. Everything in this life is temporal, everything we cannot see is eternal. When we are pressured to compromise our faith and deny Jesus by affirming that all other religions are valid, we have to be willing to sacrifice whatever is necessary to retain our faith and proclaim the pure truth of the Gospel. Jesus died to remove our sins and He rose from the dead so we could have eternal life. He is the way the truth and the life and no one can come to God except by Him, just as Jesus said in John 14:6. Jesus is not a liar and as you all learned from our testimony He is real, He works miracles, He hears our prayers and is interceding for us at the right hand of the Father. God has called all of us to repent, to be willing to turn from our sin and be willing to let Him change us into the people He wants us to be. Are you willing to let Him change your life? Are you willing to grab His hand and let Him lead you where He wants you to go? It’s a grand supernatural adventure. Now I don’t have time to tell you about when I was stalked by a coyote, or the rattlesnake encounters, the black widow spiders, the scorpion, and all those times we were kept from being cast off of bridges when the truck or trailer malfunctioned, or the time a satanist worked on our car and we lost our brakes on the way home, the one time we decided not to take the freeway. But I would like to show you a video we did that was inspired by our experiences with homelessness. I hope it touches your heart to serve the Least of These. Many blessings to everyone. |
