SUDAN DESERT NEAR AL GEDARIF

On our way to the Wad Kowli refugee camp deep in the desert. We had three vehicles, three spare tires and five flat tires from thorn punctures.

Our Sudanese team had the tools and supplies neede to fix the tires. The way of the desert.

CAMBODIA KILLING FIELDS

A church we helped on the "Killing Fields" of Cambodia.

Within hours of this photo invaders torched it. Questions: How long did it take to burn down? Minutes. How long before the fire will go out? Never!
The brave pastor had an office in the church. We got word he survived the massacre and started over with a new church in another refugee camp.

The soldiers showed us some of the recently captured weapons. Just hours after this photo Nang Chan, a refugee camp of 26,000 people, was wiped out by invaders.

UMZILIZWI, ZIMBABWE

After days without food, these children were overwhelmed by so much mealie meal in one place. They buried their hands and arms in it in awe.

It really felt good to know that we did that.

"WHO AM I, O LORD?

"Who am I, O Lord God, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far?"

King David for whom I was named said it first. I know just a bit of the awe he felt.

MY NEW BOOK IS ALMOST READY

It’s getting closer—it may be finished in a few weeks.

I’m talking about “WALK WITH ME Through Some Hard Places of the World.”

I wanted to have it be a narrative of our missions adventures with lots of photos, then I learned what it would cost to publish that way. Instead, the printed book will be text only and this blog site will be where the pictures are posted—maybe hundreds of them—starting a few months ago to be a kind of online companion to the book.

Here’s the first page of the PROLOGUE :

LET’S WALK TOGETHER.

Count each word you read as a step along a path of sentences and pages.

Walk with me through jungles, deserts, bush country, mine fields, flooded streets and alleys, through war zones and refugee camps, into cities flattened by wars or earthquakes, squalid barrios, angry ghettos, makeshift clinics, and even the hallowed halls of governments.

My wife of nearly a half-century, Jean, keeps saying about our life together, “It’s never been boring…”

If you keep walking with me we’ll come to scenes of individual love and victory, of fevers conquered and infections healed, of entire student bodies at schools once denied the Gospel now praising Jesus, of hostile countries opening to the Gospel, of a church so big they meet in a warehouse with no seats (seats would take up room where people could stand), to a baptismal service of 1,700 new converts, to poor villages where people eat tree bark and sawdust to quench the hunger pangs, to hospitals without medicines, to thousands of lives changed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

There’ll be scenes of great risk and of God’s protecting hand.

It won’t be boring.

Thousands of hours in airplanes (sometimes 800 airborne hours per year) rickety taxis, Land Rovers, carabao carts, and on foot paths have taken my soul on a journey almost too emotional to share, yet too important to leave untold.

It is my prayer that as you walk these pages with me, you will hear God’s voice telling you to step out of your comfort zone and walk your own path into missions.

VIETNAM: HANOI OPERA HOUSE

Government officials publicly thanked me for giving this free sacred concert in the famed Hanoi Opera House.

CHAMBUTA AND TONGOGARA REFUGEE CAMPS, ZIMBABWE

A Godly friend friend named Wayne Shreeve personally paid for 1200 pairs of shoes for some of our Children's Cup kids.

Most had never known the feeling of wearing shoes.

It had immediate impact on the attitude of the kids like they were saying, "I'm not just a barefoot bush kid now, I have shoes."