We pray you had a wonderful Christmas celebrating the birth of our Savior! We enjoyed family and friends and a joyous church service! We also were blessed by several donations toward the Free Prayer Center over the weekend, bringing our total received + pledged to $7,565! Only $1,435 away from reaching our $9,000 goal! God is good! AND He is BIG! Emil had a word at church about the enormity of God, encouraging people to embrace His enormity in 2017!

Our total money raised now is $9436 toward our goal of $10,000 plus we received $100 toward the cost of paint! Thank You, Lord!

We just learned that the cost for a non-profit organization to set up in the park where the RAGBRAI cyclists will be staying and/or playing along the route is $300 (per town), so now we understand why the Lord led us to walk through the parks with our FREE PRAYER shirts on! Last year we walked through the Mason City park without special shirts and had a fantastic ministry time with a guy who we ran into a couple of weeks ago! Details in our July newsletter.

A biker could hardly get off his motorcycle, the pain in his back was so bad. He said his chiropractor told him he had arthritis in his lower back which was pressing one of his discs and he would need surgery. I told him arthritis is caused by self-hatred. He agreed that he didn’t like himself. Once he recognized that, we were able to work through some of that. He repented and came out of agreement with the guilt he had carried for years, and all the pain left when we prayed for his healing. He was grinning from ear to ear as he gave me a big hug, literally leaped onto his bike, and took off down the road, hootin’ and hollerin’ all the way! Thank You, Jesus!