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I sure hope you had a wonderful New
Year and that God is richly blessing you as you serve Him. God has
been good to us and we are seeing great things from the Lord this
year and we are excited about what God is doing through us.
We held the largest conference of the year here
in our church in January. We had to rent two auditoriums at the
fair grounds and we had over 1000 people attend. We had five different
sessions during the day with over 450 in attendance and we held
a Teen Conference and an Adult Conference in the evenings. Our people
really worked hard to be able to carry out this conference and the
greatest result was that 57 teens surrendered to full-time service
and 20 adults as well. Praise the Lord!
We held our first set of Vacation Bible Clubs the
first week in February and over 850 children participated in our
ten clubs with over 300 making professions of faith. I thank the
Lord for all of our hard workers who did a great job organizing
these clubs. The Club with the highest attendance had 146 children
on the last day and this brother is BLIND! His name is Ricauter
and he is a graduate of our Bible College. I won him to the Lord
over 10 years ago and he has since been through our Bible College,
has worked in our girls' home and all four of our feeding centers,
he is the best janitor we have ever had in our church building,
and one of our best Sunday School teachers. He has Degenerative
Retinitis and has been slowly losing his sight over the years. He
is now almost completely blind and if there is anything you could
do for this man to be a blessing to him please let me know. For
sure I know you could pray for him. He is a great blessing in our
ministry and he and his wife are at camp this week helping as counselors.
He has two daughters and he loves being able to serve the Lord doing
anything and everything.
I had surgery on January 6, to take out my thyroid
gland (that showed up on all cat-scans and ultra-sounds), but when
the doctor opened me up there was only fatty tissue! She did no
have to take out anything other than a small nodule; therefore my
voice was not affected at all. I could have lost my voice completely
if she had of touched my vocal cord nerve which lies very close
to the thyroid gland. My other vocal cord was paralyzed three years
ago due to my first surgery. The nodule was sent to pathology and
the results came back negative! Praise the Lord, I am cancer FREE!
Thank you so much for your prayers.
Our oldest son, Anthony, had his eighteenth birthday
on January 16. He is very excited to be eighteen but he still has
to finish 12th grade. Pray for him as he has many major decisions
to make in the near future. Our daughter, Rachel, had her "sweet
fifteen" party just last week. She is growing up and is a beautiful
young lady. Thanks for your prayers for our family.
Please pray we may be able to get the buses that
are in Tennessee down here as soon as possible. It has been very
difficult to sell any of our older buses and we have not been able
to raise all the money we need to get the others down here. We have
around $8,000.00 saved up, but we need anywhere from $12,000 to
$15,000 to get these buses here.
Please pray we may get two acres of property close
to downtown David to build a new building. We need the building
to keep growing. We had over 4,500 people saved on the streets last
year, over 800 saved in our services and over 300 baptized. Our
goals for this year are to reach over 5,000 soul-winning, see over
1200 saved in our services, and to have over 400 baptisms. It would
be great to reach these goals but, where are we going to put them
if they keep coming to church? Please pray for us.
In His Service,
Byron and Briceida Willis
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