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Happy Thanksgiving!
Greetings to you as we begin to enter the holiday season. Our family is looking forward to celebrating Thanksgiving with friends here in Marion, NC and this may be our last in the USA for a while.
Over time, as Danielle and I have walked with the Lord together, and as He has revealed His plan for our lives, Thanksgiving has become our favorite holiday. The reasons for this may be obvious to many but I will state it anyway. We have realized, and continue to realize, the richness of the Lord’s plan for us and how much we absolutely and totally rely on Him for everything. Even the difficult times are a complete blessing to our lives as He lovingly winnows the chaff from our lives.
There are many ways He accomplishes this. One way is by allowing us to hear from many gifted pastors as we visit churches raising support, including the pastor at our host church, Matt Stevens. Danielle and I have also been exposed to and have recently been reading some of the writings of our Puritan forebears. What humble giants of the faith they were and perhaps some of the most maligned people in U.S. history.
So, I would encourage you that as Thanksgiving approaches we will all prayerfully prepare our hearts to indeed humbly give thanks to the Lord as he is the giver of all good things.
Recent Challenge...
A recent challenge we experienced is the loss of a large pledge to our ministry. Initially, this was a substantial setback. Although we still don’t know all of God’s reasons for this, we are confident of His sovereignty over our lives. We remain hopeful that we will be able to plan a move to Chile in very early 2019.
Please be in prayer for this situation and please also pray that we will soon reach our goal of being supported at 100%.
...Still Making Progress
We continue to see God bring more people onto our support team (8 new partners and 2 increases).
One amazing gift this last month came about at the time of the difficult news (see above), and was in the form of real, heartfelt encouragement. A supporting church really stepped up and showed great care for us emotionally and spiritually. We will need relationships like this even more once we are facing the many challenges of living cross culturally.
Another unexpected blessing amidst a month of up's and down's was rekindling a relationship with friends we hadn't seen in three years. God used that time together to open up a conversation about our vision for ministry and now these friends have joined our support team!
To our surprise, we are actually just about where we were prior to the loss of support! God is amazing!
Would you join us in praying?
- For God's supernatural patience as we continue to wait on those final decisions that could send us to Chile. We are so close!!
- For energy and a good attitude as we continue support raising.
- For our hearts and lives to reflect Christ more every day.
- For the Gospel to spread in Chile, especially among the differently enabled community.
30 Days of Prayer
"Prayer does not equip us for greater works - prayer is the greater work." - Oswald Chambers
Our mission agency, Mission to the World (MTW), is asking for folks to pray during the month of November for various ministries around the globe. Here is a calendar to join us! Our ministry is highlighted on November 10th!!!
Financial Support Update
We've been up ☝︎and we've been down. ☟
We are currently at 90% of our support pledged.
In God's Grace,
The Grotton Crew
David & Danielle Grotton
MTW - Chile
Account # 17072
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