Reationships

God has blessed us in too many ways to write or describe!

As we pray and prepare to launch our satellite campus in a year, we have two main objectives... to soak up the DNA of Grace Fellowship and to build relationships with people to start this journey with us. Grace is a large church with close to 6000 members. Several hundred live in the target area we plan on opening a campus in. However to assume that all of them will want to pioneer a new campus, leaving the comforts of an established campus with all its frills, would be naive.

With all these new things comes lots of opportunity! Opportunity to try the unthinkable... to strive to see dreams fulfilled! Our vision at Grace is to "be a house of prayer for all nations". This vision is broken down into three main components. "House" is true relational and biblically founded discipleship. "Prayer", there is no way we can accomplish the dreams God has given us unless they are bathed and covered by prayer and a move of the Holy Spirit.And finally, "Nations", we want to take the gospel to all people groups! 

God is teaching us so much about each one of these three components and we are so excited to see where HE will lead us in each of these.

We came to the conclusion the other day that, though while in Carrollton we were able to be a one car family, it just wasn't going to work here. We live a good distance from the church and many of my meetings are late in the afternoon, so Kim needs a car to be able to pick the boys up from school and just so she's not stuck in the house all day long. As we explored vehicles and prayed about it, we felt the Lord leading us to avoid another car payment, so we decided to pay cash for something older that could just get me to and from work. This way we have a little bit more financial flexibility to use our money in any way God wants to use it. So we have been looking for a couple of weeks and literally visiting every used car lot in northwestern Houston (too many to count). We couldn't find anything that we would feel safe spending money on for the cash we had. So back to the drawing board. After days of searching, praying and searching some more, finding cars only to have them sold before we could get there, and praying some more, I gave up. No sooner had I given up, then I noticed a little, and by little i mean tiny, dealership three blocks from the house. So little in fact, I didn't know it was a dealership. There, on the lot, was a little vehicle that fit what we were looking for, so today I drove by to let Kim look at it. We felt peace about this vehicle and decided this was the one, so we bought it. We quickly drove home to get the cash and Kim drove me back up to sign the papers and pick it up. When I walked in Samer,a very nice gentlemen who also happens to be the owner, began to  witness to me. "Do you know that the Holy Spirit told me someone was going to purchase this vehicle today?" "Do you believe in Jesus Christ the son of the one true Lord?" To which I replied "I sure do, in fact I am a pastor!" He began to cry and for the next hour Samer, a christian from Lebanon, and I shared stories and celebrated that God had brought us together. In fact, Kim and I are going to go eat Lebanese food with Samer and his Syrian wife in the next couple of weeks

In our previous post I talked about just looking for the next step. Well, God is leading us into relationships with people of other nations already. Our dream is that Grace Fellowship North would be a church that is a true mosaic of ethnicity, full of people from every tribe and tongue. That each week we would see a slice of what heaven is going to be like! As you pray with us, pray God would bring to fruition the dreams he has given us to do just that! Pray for Samer and his wife who's home countries are in such turmoil and unrest right now. Pray for North East Katy for the seeds of revival to be planted so that when God calls us to launch we might reap the harvest that is so plentiful here. Pray that God would continue to grow me into the man He needs me to be to lead and have favor here. Pray for Kim's health to become less and less of a burden and distraction for her. Pray that we might be the parents God wants us to be for our boys so they might become mighty men of God! And thank God for our little black SUV, an ever present reminder that He is guiding our every step!