Faith, Future and putting it into Practice

I wanted to share with you some things that have been on my heart and let you know where we are at as a family working in ministry.

2 Corinthians 5:7 “We live by faith, not by sight”

Faith is a word that at its core is the very fabric of belief in God. Looking at the words FaithFaithful it is used over 300 times in New Testament. and People put their Faith in Jesus, their Faith healed them, Faith guides them and the Lord is Faithful to all his promises. With the basis of our religion and all the references to Faith in the New Testament why then is Faith so hard? I believe that if you ask the majority of all people, Christian and non-Christian, that they would say that they have Faith in something. Conversely all Christians have Faith in the fact that Jesus was the son of God, he died for our sins and rose on the third day. The verse above 2 Corinthians 5:7 provides great insight to the fact that we can’t see Christ here with us, but we have Faith that his presence with us is a reality and that is how we are to live.

So why do I say living in Faith is so hard? Most people, and at times even I, think it is very easy. As I look back it was easy to put my complete trust and Faith in Christ when I accepted Him. It wasn’t until later that it became hard because He wants us to relinquish areas of our life that we simply don’t want to put our full Faith into believing that He will take care of us. At the root it is because we are control freaks! It is easy to be in Church and say that I trust the Lord and have Faith that He will provide. It is another thing completely when you have $5 left in your checking account and $400 medical co-pay due. We rack our brains on trying to figure out how WE are going to fix it and often times forget about the most basic thing of including God into the picture. I know that I do this a lot and people think that because you are a missionary that we are sort of super Christian, but in reality we have struggles just like everyone else. Jesus tells us many times in the New Testament that if we ask in His name that He will do it, John 14:14 “You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.” Pretty cut and dry right! We ask, then after period of time we doubt and don’t have Faith in the very thing that He said that He would do. This is where I find a great challenge, to have complete Faith in his provisions.

A great question is, that if Faith is a cornerstone of our way of life, what areas are you actively living out in it?

Future

As we mentioned in the previous blog it is our hearts desire to move back to the Dominican
Republic on a full-time basis. When we started to split our years by spending part of it in the Dominican and part in Louisville we agreed to a two year commitment. While it has been wonderful to serve in the home office it has also been made clear that our hearts are with those whom we work with and serve in the Dominican. Sunshine and I have been talking a lot about the Future and what we feel that God has in store for us. It has been much more challenging than I expected as we always expect a clear cut answer. Often times I feel that it would be so much easier if the answer was clear, but alas that is part of where Faith comes back into play.

What we do know is that the work that we do in the Dominican is a vital part of who we have become. We both want to continue to invest in the lives of the Dominican’s and Haitians that we have gotten to know over the years. Spend time at the feeding centers playing and teaching the kids, work with the children in the sports ministry, helping build homes, churches, feeding centers, reaching thousands via medical clinics and reaching the lost for Christ. As much as we love the people of Hispaniola we equally love working with the teams of Americans that come down to serve. We have a deep rooted passion to serve and to continue to serve in this capacity.

In Practice

Here is where Faith and our Future come together. We are putting our Faith in God that He will provide the resources for us to realize the Future.

Matthew 7: 7-8 “Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”

We are fervently in prayer, and ask that you pray as well, that God will help open doors so that we financially can continue to do ministry without going into debt. We were blessed before joining the ministry to start fund raising for about 10 months and built up a reserve. Our first year of ministry we were very close to our minimum budget needed and we were able to offset the small difference from the reserve. After that first year is when the economy in the US took a big step back and unfortunately we had several supporters whom could no longer continue on with us. Simultaneously we have had a large increase in expenses to our budget. All that being said we had a monthly shortfall of $1000 per month in support. We were able to add some supporters over the last couple of months and that allowed us to get that total down to $700 per month. In addition, our reserve was set to run out in July of 2010, but it was amazing to see that as each month that passed God has provided one time gift for us to where we have not run out of funds for the last seven months. We recently received our last ministry statement and we are down to $100 left in our reserve. This is a very difficult position to find ourselves in, but we have Faith that God will continue to provide for us. The most difficult part is checking our own ego, the nervousness of asking for financial support, and know that we can ask you as brothers and sister in Christ to help us meet our need.

Here is what we are asking:

First: Prayer that is always first and foremost. Pray that God will allow doors to be opened and hearts softened so that we will receive what is needed financially. Pray that the 115 letters we sent out last month would be fruitful. Also, since you are praying already, pray for those lives that we will come in contact with this year.

Secondly: For those of you that already support us we want you to know how appreciative we are of that. We would like to ask you if possible to make an increase to your giving. Also, and perhaps more importantly if you know of anyone else who might be interested in supporting missionaries that you share our passion with them. We need advocates on our behalf to take our work and share it with small groups, churches and individuals.

Thirdly: We ask those of you who are not supporters of ours to consider becoming a partner with us TODAY! As mentioned above we need to raise $700 a month in donations or $8,400 per year. I know for some it is easy to budget in a monthly amount, but for others it is easier to send in a one-time gift per year. Either way is awesome!

You can send in your gifts to the address below, Please make all checks out to G.O. Ministries but remember to put Eric & Sunshine Leach in the memo line. You can also click on the “Give” tab on the top of the blog page and follow the steps there. As always you can contact us and we would be happy to send you a copy of our ministry budget, as we always want to have transparency in our ministry.

Peace & Blessings

G.O. Ministries

11501 Plantside Dr. Suite #14

Louisville, KY 40299

New Role With G.O. Ministries

This past May as we were just starting our summer down here Brook, the President of G.O. Ministries, approached Sunshine and I about serving in a new capacity within the Ministry. Brook asked us to consider splitting our time between the home office in Louisville, KY and Santiago, Dominican Republic. At first thought privately we weren’t really too sure about it, we had just sold or given away pretty much everything that we owned in order to move the Dominican, we were just starting to get settled and weren’t thinking we wanted to start another new transition process! So, we decided to seek council of friends and most importantly God.

As some time went by we felt like God was telling us that either way we chose, we would be serving him. I then ran across some text in the Bible:

“Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, serving as overseers-not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not greedy for money, but eager to serve.”

1 Peter 5:2

What struck me about this verse is that we are to be willing to serve, not out of duty but because our heart with God is right. Our prayer about the possible change became more of how best can we serve you Lord because we know you will provide. It was after that that both Sunshine and I had peace about our decision. The more we thought about it, it became clear: G.O. Ministries has grown very fast the last five years and currently has hundreds of Nationals in five Countries, one major school with eight satellite schools in churches, approximately seventy churches, eight full time feeding centers serving over 4,000 meals a month, eleven construction projects and countless other undertakings. I tell you all this not to brag or boast, but simply to show you the scope of what G.O. does and why we have decided to go back and help out. All of these things are going on with at the time four people working in the home office! What a huge undertaking. We have since brought on one more person to help, plus added some responsibility on to another so that when we arrive in Louisville there will be eight of us in the office.

I am sure you are asking what does it mean for Sunshine and I? We will be heading back to Kentucky on October 2^nd and start working in the office right away. Our schedule will be flexible in that if there are medical teams or teams that we recruit to go on short term trips we will travel back to the Dominican. Ideally we would group them all together to spend a month there all at one time in the spring. After our big annual fundraiser at Churchill Downs with the Kentucky Derby we will head back to the D.R. and remain for the entire summer thru September each year. So it will look like 7 months in the States and 5 months in the Dominican. The time in Kentucky will allow Sunshine to make more contacts within the Medical field, recruit more medical teams and work on a steady pipeline of medicine for our clinics. I will be working with Brook on the administrative business side, working on budgets, timelines, fundraising and coordinating various other projects.

We are excited about serving God in this new role. We will continue to fill you in as things progress, but one big praise; is that we have a temporary place to live in Louisville until the end of the year as we search for a place. We will also be reaching out to you possibly in the future for help in getting donations to set up our home in place. We want to thank you for all your love and support this last year and give God all the glory for the things accomplished thus far.

Summer comes to an end

We have crossed the finish line, just the summer finish line that is! For the last eleven weeks straight we have had some great people from churches all over the US come down to the Dominican Republic to serve. It has been our joy to work with these teams and share all that God is doing down here thru their dedication to serving. As we reflect on the highs and lessons that we learned we are grateful to have experienced it all. We wanted to share with you some of the memorable things from this summer and some of things that God showed us during our struggles.

Eric’s Highlights:

· Having both American’s, Dominican’s and Haitian’s accept Christ as their Lord and Savior.

· Witnessing American’s, Dominican’s and Haitians being baptized in rivers & oceans.

· The starting of a new feeding center in Batey Cuchilla. The building is a year or two away from completion, but thanks start-up funding 50 new children six days a week will get a hot meal.

· Starting of several new construction projects.

· Learning the true power of prayer!

Eric’s learned lessons:

· God showed me patience this summer. Patience in that things don’t always go according to plan, patience that things don’t operate here like in the States and patience that people are not all the same personality and that is a good thing.

· That it truly is all about Him and not about us. Often times it is difficult to check our own pride at the door and that in all that we do it should bring glory to God.

Sunshine’s Highlights:

• This summer in our traveling medical clinics, we were able to bring medicine to 3,726 people.

• We hosted a dental clinic this spring that was able visit our school, and clean about 400 students’ teeth.

• Our community medical clinic is doing well. Dr. Canela is treating on average 45 patients every afternoon. People are traveling as far as 2 hours away for medical assistance.

Sunshine’s learned lessons:

• God has really showed me the power of prayer this summer. He has shown me time and time again that He is faithful to do what He promises.

• To not be intimidated to strive to be the kind of woman that God has called me to be.