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Dear Friends,
We have completed our move from Three Hills back to the Sunchild Reserve! Today we finally got our phone hooked up and we are back on email now also. This is truly a different world here as we experienced trying to get the phone. We ran into many glitches and had to see numerous answers to prayer for it to ever happen. It got so bad that the customer service dept. of the phone co. hung up on us. The local line man knew us and got involved spending hours of his time and expertise and inside influence. Then, out of the blue, an angel, who worked in the Montreal office took our cause and spent many hours on the case. The phone co. had lost their records for the line coming in here and basically denied it existed. It is an example of how the smallest task, which in other places would only take moments, yet here is often a long drawn out difficulty that leaves one frazzled and exhausted.
So our situation here is as follows. First of all we are happy and thrilled to be involved in a great work in God's kingdom. We face difficulties but feel privileged as day after day we see God working. We still don't have our house back and don't know for sure what will happen concerning that. We are living in the apartment above the church, which is also a Sunday School class room. Our cold water line comes from the house next door along with one electric circuit from that breaker box which gives us very limited electrical capacity. Obviously this situation is problematic and uncertain and concerning this and related issues we need God to intervene - soon. I've had much pain and soul searching because we could have done things differently in the past, so that we could have kept control over the mission property and not be in this situation. What it boils down to is that when we left here in 2001 we desperately needed a break and needed someone to fill in here for us. When no one was available to help, we made a huge mistake how we worked things out. I've learned so much as to how impossible it is for a person in trauma and stress and alone, to think clearly and can sympathize with others who use poor judgment under stress.
A friend has purchased two 16x23 wall tents along with lumber and plywood to make floors and frames. One will be used for a Sunday School room and the other a kitchen – dining room. We have been experiencing the worse blizzard of the winter which just ended here today. We have had no spring at all yet and the ground is still froze solid and snow covered as I write this, so we are waiting for better weather to work on this. (Yes, this weather is very unusual to say the least.) Other immediate projects include installing a water heater and a shower. At least it helps to do without these if we believe it is temporary.
Our VBS is scheduled for July 6-11 and you are invited to come and help. If you fly into Calgary we will pick you up. Right after that the Eagles Wings organization from the States is sending a team of 30 young people along with support staff for an event here on Sunchild-O'Chiese and Hobbema. They spend an average of $20,000 on one of these evangelistic events, so you can see we are privileged to have a well organized event to prepare for and you to pray for. Then in August a team of 12 are coming from Germany, and some of our young people will go to the Wilderness Village camp. Although the Bible College students won't be available now, until the fall semester starts, some who are staying for the summer want to continue coming up through the summer if we can raise support for the gas money from the Three Hills community. There have been two adult suicides here in the last week. Our attendance has been running around 40 to 50 on Sundays and we have an adult-teen event every Thursday. The college drama team, which uses only Scriptural dramas, was invited to spend an entire day at the Sunchild Public School, which has around 400 students! It was an amazing day for them to bring the Gospel to these students.
Please keep us in your prayers... In His Service... Rodger & Karen Rinker
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