It is so good to be back in the United States! I know that the Supreme Court messed things up with the sodomite-marriage ruling, but it is still the greatest country in the world. We still have freedom of worship and freedom of speech, and the Second Amendment is still alive.
I remember years ago in Rwanda, about 2010, when grenades were being tossed in buses and exploding somewhere on a weekly basis. At that time,the police went door to door through the whole city searching every house for weapons. Angela was the only one home when they came to search our house, but they did not search it only because we were foreigners. That is not happening in the USA yet.
It is also a joy to have fellowship with fellow believers in the churches we are visiting. Again, we are the only independent, fundamental, Baptist missionaries in the whole country. We have a great time when we fellowship with the folks in our church in Rwanda, but it is still not the same as here.
These two months have been extremely busy. We have our motor home that was in storage from our last furlough, but it really needed a lot of work. I thank Jerry Ossewaarde at Hyles-Anderson College for helping me with a lot of the repairs. We changed all the brakes pads, balanced tires, changed a brake caliper, turned rotors, fixed the leaking roof, changed shock absorbers, repaired brake lines, and a bunch more little things.
Then while out on the road, we had a gear on our overdrive unit explode into five pieces, but God allowed us to still drive two hours on it till we got to our meeting. Amen! We had to totally replace that unit. When I opened it up, gear parts literally just came pouring out! Then we had our carburetor rebuilt and got a new distributer. Whew! Lots of repair! I think it should now be fine till January to finish this furlough.
But most importantly, it has been great to see family again after four years of being on the field. The kids really enjoyed Youth Conference at First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana. Caleb and Timothy also got to travel with Grandpa (Warren Storm) for three weeks and help him fix busses at different churches.
Please pray that we get some goals done on furlough. First, we need to raise more support. Our support went down while prices went up, so now we have about 80% of what we need. Second, we need to get a new 4.3 liter engine for our Chevy Astro van. Third, we need to get a studio-transmitter-link for the second tower in Rwanda. This will cost about $7,000.
Thank you again for your regular prayers and support. In May and June, we saw 42 people trust Christ, 6 professions of faith, 4 baptisms, and 149 saved through the radio.
In His service,
Gregg, Angela, Caleb, Hannah, Timothy, Virginia, Micah, and Zachery Schoof