How it all Began

In the Summer of 1992 I was pastoring a church in Ohio.  A missionary whom was supported by our church visited us and spent some time with our family.  He was a close personal friend and love to spend time with our children.  The missionary had some work to do on his car and asked my oldest son who was 14 at the time to help him.  Within a few hours Grady was running into the house asking if he could go and work with the missionary some time in the next year.  We approved and within six months Grady was on his way to Haiti to help the missionary work in the mountains building church buildings for the pastors who had been trained by our missionary and were growing churches.  Week after week for three months Grady would call us on Saturday mornings and tell us of the hunger and excitement for the Word of God of the people he was meeting.  He was always amazed that most of them had never heard of Jesus and when they did hear they would immediately trust Him as Savior.  On one of the calls he suggested that we should think about going some place where people did not know the Gospel.  That evening Pat and I discovered that we both had been thinking the same thing.  After Grady returned home we presented the idea to the family and all the children were very excited at the idea.  We then began to pray.  As a family we decided to pray for thirty days to ask the Lord to make His will clear to us as to where He would have us to go.  I began praying and after a time of prayer I would get Pat and she would continue praying for a time.  When she finished she would then get Grady and when he finished he would get his 12 year old sister (Courtney)who would get her twin brother (Nathan) when she was done.  Even 9 year old Amber and her 7 year old Summer were included in the prayer cycle which went on for 24 hours a day for the entire month of June of 1993.  On the first day of July of that year I announced to the chruch that I would be resigning as pastor to leave for the mission field as soon as we could sell our things and get ready to go.  Many thought we were acting in an unreasonable manner, but everyone of us were had a total peace of mind that we were doing exactly what the Lord wanted us to do.  On august 17 of that year we left for Mexico and we have been watching the Lord accomplish great miracles since we arrived.  We crossed the border by faith and by faith the Lord has provided all our needs for almost twenty years.