Until The Nets Are Full: Spring Planting!

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Summer is finally here...which in this house means silliness is altogether unrestrained!

Dear Friends and Prayer Warriors,
Your prayers are a blessing to us! Since I missed May, this blog is the last two months in pictures, as well as a glance ahead at the rest of summer.

Sam and Desiree Dyer came to West Hills to share about their ministry to refugees in Germany. We're excited to be partnering with them in taking the Gospel to the nations!

As a church, West Hills had stopped supporting missions altogether in an effort just to keep the doors open. Supporting missions is one of the critical roles of the church, and by God's grace we've restarted the church's support of the Gospel going to all the nations and begun partnering with a couple of missionary families!

Lily sharing her Jeep with the Dyer kids, a little missionary-hospitality! They were precious together!

Meanwhile...

Solidarity! (Note the cage is unlocked. He put himself in there!)

Mommy/daughter field trip to see Swan Lake and then have afternoon tea!

As she gets close to the end of Kindergarten, Lily's love for stories is growing! Meredith has started her on the classics!

Hosea's spontaneous reaction to completing his first waterfall hike!

The mountains are lovely! You should come visit! This is about 30 minutes from our house.

We had the privilege of attending a formal wedding for some friends in NC, so we got all dolled up like kids going to prom! It was a lot of fun, and she's a whole lot prettier than my first prom date!

In May we celebrated our 9th Wedding Anniversary with a couple of nights at "The Happiest Place on Earth"! (Yes, we went to Disney and left the kids with their grandparents! It was awesome!)

I've not met many celebrities, but this one was very, very nice!

After much planning and praying, the Garden of Hope at West Hills is finally beginning to become a reality, and most of the last month has been planning for and getting that process moving. By God's grace, the building inspector gave us a clear go-ahead with no need for permits! So...

Mr. Josh Idell came and terraced the hill behind the church where the garden is going to go. (His dad Jeff put in an appearance too!) We are so thankful for these men!

Mesmerized! Hosea often says "I wants to drive a tractor when I grows up to be a big, strong man!"

The current state of the garden area. The church owns all the way to the storage buildings in the back of this picture. Bush-hogging and reclaiming the rest of the back yard is on this month's agenda.

We had a great group of young people come out and help us build our widows garden, which will serve both to provide fresh produce to our widows at West Hills, and as a demonstration garden for the raised beds we're going to build behind the church that people can sign up to use.

Mixing the "dirt" (that's not actually dirt.)

This garden has six beds altogether.

Each bed is now planted with all sorts of wonderful things including tomatoes, peppers, beans, melons, herbs, and flowers!

The finished widows' garden.

In the last blog you read that we're going to plant sunflowers in the front yard. We had a bit of a learning curve there as well. We had to kill the grass first, which is currently dying. We should have them in the ground in the next couple of weeks. They're a little late, but should still bloom nicely before frost hits!

At the end of May, Mike Griffis from the Denton Bible Missions Office came and spent five days with us, encouraging us and seeing our ministry first hand. I talk to Mike about life and ministry planning regularly, and it was great to have him experience our part of the world firsthand!

Besides the Garden....
The Lord is blessing our ministry at West Hills, and we need your prayers now more than ever. We have been praying that the Lord would send us another couple of families to join us in the work, and by God's grace our friends Danny and Jessica and their five kids have answered that prayer. Another young family is visiting, and a third is fairly regular. This gives us a core group of about 14 adults and 11 kids. This week, the next big change takes place. Because we're still small enough to essentially function like a church small group, we're going through the first book of the 2:7 Series from the Navigators as a church. On Sunday mornings, I'm teaching through the relevant Bible passages, and on Wednesday nights, we're having a small group meeting to share what we're learning and how God's Word applies to our daily lives. This is a great beginner Bible study that focuses on some critical "how-tos" like how to study the Bible, how to develop a closer relationship with God, how to develop a keener sense of priorities, how to renew our concern for non-Christian friends, and how to deepen our relationships with others in our church. This summer's study is the next layer of the foundation for a healthy church. As a church, we've got to be walking closely with the Lord and cultivating a love for others that is visible and tangible. The garden project is simply a way for us to build relationships with our lost neighbors in order to share the Gospel. If it just becomes about great tomatoes, we're no different than our lost neighbors.

How can you help?

1. You can "struggle for us in prayer" as the apostle Paul struggled for the churches who hadn't met him personally (Colossians 2:1). Your prayers move the hands of the Lord in a way we may never understand fully in this life, but we experience daily. So, I ask you to pray for the Lord's will in this work, and his blessing on his church.

2. Pray for Jonesborough and our lost neighbors here in Tennessee, that even now the Lord would be softening hearts to the message of the Gospel.

3. Pray for the mission teams that are coming over the next two months to serve in the construction and promotion of the garden project. Trips are still open. You're invited. Pray about coming! Then come.

4. "Like" our new Garden of Hope Facebook page. You can find it at www.facebook.com/gardenofhopewh It just got finished this week. The lost world is on social media. We're going to utilize the Facebook page to promote the garden with our lost neighbors. The more "likes" we have, the more credible we are locally. So, if you're on social media, we'd ask you to bless us by liking and sharing the page.