We hope each one of you has enjoyed a great Christmas of remembering God’s gift of His Son to us and celebrating with your families! We certainly enjoyed our Christmas time with Todd’s family and especially savored it because it will be our last one before we leave for Brazil. That is bittersweet—we will miss our family, but we are overjoyed to see how God is working! We enjoy seeing God’s plan in action—His timing is perfect! We still have not set an exact date, but we are concentrating on leaving in March or April. Please rejoice with us and pray for God’s completion of the work He has started in raising our support.
We apologize for the silence over the last several weeks. We experienced some scary computer problems, thinking we had lost everything, but we praise the Lord (!!!) that Todd was able to recover it all and reconfigure our computer! So we’re back on!
We are so pleased to be able to be so close to going to Brazil. We’ve been told we can set a date when we reach 80% of our support and we are inching from 70% closer day-by-day. We are communicating with two churches that are in the process of deciding whether they will be supporting us or not. Please pray for the Lord’s clear direction for their decisions. Also, this weekend we will be speaking in Kansas, and we have several more meetings set up over the next months. So we know the Lord is working on our behalf and we are so excited to know the time is nearing!
We do want to thank so many of you for your prayers for Todd and Molly through their surgeries and recovery. Molly is doing very well. Her husband, James, actually said that they’ve never experienced such a smooth post-surgery recovery with her adjustments to the anti-rejection drugs. We praise the Lord so much for them and their friendship. Todd’s recovery is going so well. He’s back to being able to exercise and feeling almost back to normal. He went back to Mayo the day after Christmas for his three month checkup and received an extensive check up to try to figure out why he’s been having some tightness in breathing. Even though we didn’t find an answer to the question, they did a thorough checkup and we know that Todd is fine. They even went so far as to make extra appointments for a stress-test and EKG. So we can rest assured that the Lord has brought Todd through this season for Him and for His glory. Please praise the Lord with us!
As for the future, we head to Kansas this weekend and look forward to several more meetings in the next few months. We even have some as late as May, that we set up knowing that we might have to cancel them. We are also pursuing setting up meetings with our already supporting churches to develop relationships with the people within the churches. We would love to raise more prayer support—we really believe that is what will sustain us through the transitions, the adjustments, and the trials that each missionary faces the first term and especially the first year on the field. We do ask that if you haven’t told us that you are praying or want to pray for us regularly, that you would let us know. When we inevitably get tempted to be discouraged or we face a trial, we will say, “God is sustaining us through the prayers of our partners in the United States.” What an encouragement that is already!
So we ask for your prayer now for several things:
- Our trip to Kansas this weekend. For safety in travel, and the meetings to minister to the hearts of God’s people for missions.
- For God to guide us through the maze of applying for visas and all the bureaucracy that is inevitable.
- For wisdom in making decisions in home schooling and for me to give Michaela consistency throughout the next months of moving and transition.
- For Samuel as he is potty training and that we would be consistent while traveling.
- For decisions about our belongings—store, send to Brazil, sell/give away?
- For consistency and priority of our personal walks with God and family prayer time.
- For continued closeness and unity in our marriage and family--we would remember to take time and enjoy each other.
- For our family that we are leaving in the U.S.
Thank you each one of you for your love, prayers, support and encouragement. We are so grateful for you each day and we could not be going to Brazil to reach the Brazilians without our partnership with you! Thank you!
Serving together,
Todd and Julie Hendry
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