Many of you know where this post is headed even before you read it! Every ministry out there (like Tim’s InterVarsity thing) is trying to get your attention at the end of the year. So let me knock this out quickly! I know you’re busy and like the rest, contending with a thick layer of Covid-induced weirdness!

First, gratitude.

Thanks so much for all those out there reading my posts, thinking about Graduate Faculty Ministries and praying for our work. You are the proverbial Aaron and Hur of our mission – Exodus 17. Nothing of significance can happen without God’s unique empowerment of our work. That happens when you pray.

Second, more gratitude.

Our work happens when (and only if) it’s supported by donations. The fact that you and others steward your resources to include InterVarsity IS absolutely vital to our mission. When (and only if) resources are present, staff like me are freed up to run zoom staff meetings, pray together with faculty and student leaders, study the bible together in online communities and do the many things we’re called to do in spite of covid’s limiting impact. Thank you! Thank you for including us in your giving budget. Thank you for sacrifices you may be making in order to send donations. Thank you for moving Graduate Faculty Ministry forward through your giving.

Last thing. Would you please give me 3 minutes?

Click here to be taken to Tim’s 2021 Ministry Partnership response form.

It’s extremely helpful to know how you’d like to partner with me in the coming year. To do that as quickly and paperlessly as possible, would you be willing to bounce over to the google form and fill it out? I realize life is probably crazy right now, but this is really the best time of the year to bug you about this.

I’m really helped by knowing…

• How would you like to hear from me – do you prefer texts or email?
• How you’d like to partner with me financially if you know that at this point.
• Any changes in your contact information.
• The names of people you know who would be good for me to network with.

This year especially I need to find two kinds of people: EITHER people who could begin some form of financial support, OR people currently giving who could increase their support some- even just a 10% bump. That might sound crazy given the pandemic we’re experiencing. But my reality is that 2020 has been a difficult year of losing support financially. I’m making some progress on finding new donors, but not fast enough. Increases from existing donors is also a way of stabilizing ministry for me. If your response involves sending a gift now, click here to be taken to Tim’s donation page at InterVarsity. If you need help with that, just fill out the ministry response form for now. Thanks!

Please pray for my ministry budget this coming year. Most immediately I’m trying to wipe out a deficit that has crept into my 2020 numbers (see previous post). Pray for me to find new sources of support. Of course pray (like we’re already praying) that the pandemic would grind to a stop, the economy would recover, and we could all get back to a “better normal” than we’re living now!

Here’s what the top of the Google-form looks like when you click thru.

Thanks so much! Looking forward to hearing from you. I’ll repost this form throughout December in case you can’t get to it right now.

So what happens when donations fall behind budget, Tim? Great question. So glad you asked. Fortunately I haven’t been in this position much due to careful management and consistent donations. During the first couple of years of joining InterVarsity Staff, everyone works at building up enough budget to make longer term ministry sustainable. If you run ahead of what is being spent out of your budget, it positions you for a possible pay raise. But if you run behind, you carry your deficit till donations rebound, you recruit more donors or you cut expenses (usually a pay cut).

As I’ve been hinting, Covid has taken a bite out of what already is a faith-stretching challenge. Every year the basic goal in my case is to find enough giving units to cover a $102K budget and add on top of that the resources I need for developing new ministry in my territory. Without Covid, I started 2020 with no deficit and with a need to find about $12K in new support. With Covid, I’ve needed to find an additional $7-8K.

First things first, I need to close my “covid gap”. InterVarsity is helping me with a matching grant to make up the deficit as quickly as possible. The match began on November 1st and will be in effect till Jan 31st, 2021.

What does the match really mean?

For NEW support dollars I find between Nov 1st and Jan 31st, 2021, InterVarsity will match dollar for dollar up to $7,000. This will kill off my deficit and help me find new amounts of sustained support. Till now I’ve been reaching out to selected individuals to see if they’d like to help. I’ve found $3,900 from 6 sources! I’m over half way there (Pickto Chart)! The remaining $3,100 I hope will come in from another dozen or so people I’ve asked (as well as response to this blog post).

How could I help you?

First, I’m hoping and praying that if God has placed you on my support team, you’ll continue giving as you have been. My 80-ish active donors are basically keeping me in place, enabling me to do ministry and be paid for it. I’m so grateful for the core of my team who are just rock solid! I THANK YOU. MY FAMILY THANKS YOU!

There are two ways you can further help if you are one of those rock solid supporters and you have the ability. 1- any additional one-time amount you give on top of your usual donation will go to the covid relief match. 2- if you increase your monthly or annual amount that you are able to give, the difference will also be matched dollar for dollar.

I’m pretty sure the covid gap will be going away by the end of Jan 31st. I’ll still need to keep building my budget on top of that. Getting rid of my covid gap means that I’ll get out of deficit and back on my way to building my long-term ministry budget.

If you are an informed ministry partner, reading the blog and praying for me, but have not been able to donate, now would be a great time to jump on board if you’re able to help.

Click here to be taken to Tim’s donation page.

Thanks so much for what you do to make it possible for me to lead and serve in Graduate Faculty Ministries. Hope you and your family will have have a safe and meaningful Thanksgiving. If you have any questions about helping out please email me at this link:

tim.perry@intervaristy.org

Be blessed and stay well!

Last week I had the best night of IV staff work I’ve experienced since the pandemic began! A group of Creighton OT2 students invited me to teach their small group in Oct/Nov. I brought them the story of Naomi (aka the book of Ruth). It’s the perfect pandemic narrative.

What’s with the loops?

This is one way to look at the story-line of the book of Ruth. I learned it as the Lowry Loop waaaay back in Homiletics lab. A character is moving along minding her own business, then out the blue something drops from the sky that threatens life. In Naomi’s case it was a famine. But it wasn’t just an isolated threat – it became a Quadruple Whammy!

Just like covid, an unwelcome antagonist unleashed multiple waves of undeserved punishment. Have you ever wondered why trials never happen as singlets? They always come two-for-the-price-of-one or in a convenient four-pack (like Costco uni-sex, one-size-fits-all underwear).

Naomi’s family lost their livelihood to a famine. They moved to a neighboring country with a foreign language and a very foreign god. Then things really got interesting… Naomi’s husband dies. Naomi has to marry her two sons off to Moabite women (what Jewish mother in her right mind would do that). Then her two sons die one after the other. And she’s left literally with nothing that would give a Jewish woman a hope or a future.

Are you sure this was a great pick for your group?

The students I’m studying Ruth with are Occupational Therapists in training. These are the people who put you back together after you have a stroke or some other accident or medical disaster. These students already know the book of Ruth when you stop and think about it. Naomi found herself after Lowry Loop #3 in a paralysis, stuck in a living situation she would have never picked for herself. Waiting for a vaccine.

There were a total of 9 of us who studied the book of Ruth. Here’s our group when we did chapter 4. A few striking pandemic-relief realities we found in the lives of Naomi and Ruth:

1. Trials will always come. Just count on them. Not if… When… they come will you hold life loosely enough to let God move you through them? They will hurt. You will lose things.
2. Will hardship mar your identity? Or will character pull you through the pandemic and make you a better person on the other side? Naomi’s name means “pleasant”. When she crawled back to Bethlehem after her humiliation she said, “Don’t call me Naomi, call me Mara.” Mara means “bitter”. She blamed God for her losses and was ready to let her pandemic redefine her personality. Is anyone reading this?
3. God provides the redemptive turn. It may take a while. God’s goal isn’t your paralysis. Your plot-line will bend back in a redemptive direction.
4. There were 6 redemptive turns (at least) in the Naomi and Ruth’s story. Moab DID provide food and stability following the famine. Ruth and Orpah WERE good women for Naomi’s sons. The grain harvests DID return to Bethlehem. Etc…
5. God’s favorite redemptive turns come in the form of people. God is never interested in just giving you the stuff you need. It’s so much more fun for him to give you the PEOPLE you need. Naomi needed Ruth and Orpah. She and Ruth needed Boaz and his good favor. Naomi needed her friends back in Bethlehem (even if they were tempted to gossip about her). Ruth needed Boaz. They all needed baby Obed at the end of the story!

So, how’s your pandemic going?

Are your losses still dogging you? Are you still in pain about anything? How do you feel about God letting this happen to you and those you care about? What’s interesting about Naomi’s story-line is that in spite of her crappy attitude, God doesn’t allow her to change her name from Naomi to Mara. Don’t let covid wear your personality down and change you from a Naomi to a Mara! Ask God to show you WHO you need and don’t be so worried about not having WHAT you need. At the end of the story when little Obed is peeing in her lap, Naomi’s girlfriends are laughing at her with joy. “Naomi has a son.” (Naomi, you do know that’s Ruth’s baby…)

When you think of my ministry, first of all, pray for these terrific Occupational Therapy Doctoral students! They are working incredibly hard to one day put themselves in a place of skilled healing in the lives of countless wounded people. They’ll be God’s people in a place of redemptive turn. They’ll get to see God use them to move life forward. Pray for their training. Pray for their relationship with Jesus to grow during these years of intense work. Pray for them as they each deal with their own pandemic antagonists.

Working on finding more donors….

Secondly, when you think of me, pray for God to bring more supporters to my ministry. I’m currently trying to address a deficit that has been developing since early last spring. As of October 31st, I need to resolve an $11K budget deficit! In posts to follow I’ll update you on how I’m doing with closing the Covid Gap. Between now and the end of the year I’ll be asking everyone supporting my work to let me know how they plan to partner with me in 2021. Please reply me when you get those posts!

My God bless you and keep you. Have a terrific and safe Thanksgiving!

Click here to donate to Tim’s work.

In this post I’ll share a talk with you that our Regional Staff Team experienced this summer when we convened virtually for a three day conference. The link to the video in this post below will take you to author and Northpark Theological Seminary professor Soong-Chan Rah. About 47 of us were gathered around the broader theme of social justice and race relations. In light of what our campuses, our ministry and our nation is enduring this 2020 – Year of Covid, Year of Cultural Unrest, Year of Financial Threat – turns out we heard from two of the most relevant voices God could have brought to our badly itching ears!

24 minutes. I think you should watch this.

The first talk is Soong-Chan unraveling themes, partly from his 2015 book Prophetic Lament (commentary on the Old Testament book of Lamentations) and partly from his new release Unsettling Truths. Soong-Chan takes a few minutes to greet some InterVarsity homies. You can fast forward to three and a half minutes into his talk where he digs into Lamentations. [Sheila Wise Rowe takes over after Soong-Chan with a talk on her book Healing from Racial Trauma. See previous posts.]

Probably not the juiciest book-plug you’ve heard all week, but I’ve been really excited about Soong-Chan’s talk and his book and the book of Lamentations! It’s helping me make sense of what I’m seeing all around me as I try to keep myself from coming off the rails in 2020.

IF… you watch Soong-Chan’s talk, let me also invite you to a google doc I’ve been using for watch parties I’ve sponsored. You’ll want to be on the google doc on your lappy while you’re watching Soong-Chan on your phone. I’ve outlined his talk there and left some spaces for viewers to leave their thoughts next to a few discussion questions. Feel free to leave your comments anonymously. I’d love to know what more people think of this!

Discussion Guide

Soong-Chan Video on Lamentations

Hope you are finding a way to get outside this fall. Its been the most pleasant autumn I remember in my 14 years here in Omaha! Take care!

We’re rebuilding our GFM group at Creighton. If you would have told me two years ago that I’d be relaunching the group of 20 students we had then, with just two students this fall, I wouldn’t have guessed it in my wildest pandemic imagination. Pandemics can be hard on group moral! Maybe you’ve been experiencing that in your communities.

Last year we were struggling to maintain momentum in the School of Pharmacy and Health Professions (the flywheel effect in reverse if you will). We had a really encouraging New Student Outreach. We’d met about a dozen new students in addition to the dozen or so who were active the year before. This time last year little did I realize we wouldn’t see a single student at an in-person activity all year! No kidding.

Vapid expectations crept through my efforts to restart “the group” this August. No Student Activity Fair hosted by Creighton. No new student contacts to speak of. Just an aging list of last year’s contacts. Three students indicated that they would not be returning to the group, but were starting a group of their own with pharmacy colleagues. (That’s actually terrific – they have a national organization they can connect with that is just focused on Pharmacy). I got the text seen above from No-Religion-Nate (hope you have a nice life, Nate, not sure why you signed up last year in the first place). I heard back from Lela – a student who attended GFM once her first year, but withdrew from the OTD program last fall. Crickets from 14 others after three attempts.

And then there was Madison. And Kayshe ( long a, silent e ). Thank you Lord!

Two students! That’s our group at this point. I’m very grateful for them both and very encouraged with their positive outlook. Madison and Kayshe have zoomed with me for the past three weeks. Just getting to know them, sharing some GFM vision with them and discerning how I can invest in their leadership. They are a part of a group that has started on its own this fall. Pretty much just students in their class (OT-2s). I felt it best to just coach them and see what kind of resources I can give them for the group they are already in. I’ve still made no contacts with new students!

Tim, how is your team doing? (a fly-over)

Kevin / Univ of Iowa / Iowa City: In his 41st year on staff, reaching grad students and some faculty, meeting totally via zoom this fall, also teaching a class the university is doing at a local prison!

Jake / Univ of Kansas / Lawrence: Just finished a year-long chaplain residency program at St. Luke’s in Kansas City, has been part time with GFM this past year, has had a terrific year of MPD with his budget in great shape, also rebuilding his group after key students moved on from last spring.

Mark / K-State / Manhattan: Working with several faculty groups, recently connecting with an ecumenical campus minister group reading an engaging book about Jesus, and when he’s not busy with other things…he’s writing a book (something about God and Star Trek).

Linda / Washington Univ / St. Louis: New staff member as of this spring, is herself alumnus of GFM at Harvard, she and her team mate are rebuilding the Wash-U grad student fellowship, and when she’s not helping her husband be a Wash-U professor, she’s serving a local non-profit called St. Louis Bicycle Works.

Tom / Iowa State / Ames: Leads a faculty ministry, is an emeritus professor at ISU in biological sciences, in addition to GFM ministry Tom teaches an ISU honors seminar each year called Faith and Science. He’s gearing up for another session next spring.

George / K-State / Manhattan: Currently the the one leading our team in Back to Face to Face Ministry! George does a thing called Bike Night, reaching international students through food, the Gospel and bike repair! He and his wife also host Brunch and Bible on Saturday mornings in their home!

Josh / Washington Univ / St. Louis: Is Linda’s team mate in leading the grad student part of our ministry at Wash-U, works full time in a lab in addition to volunteering his time with GFM, loves making (and selling and delivering) his own dumplings! Covid has thus far deprived me of tasting them, but I really like Josh anyway and am so glad he’s on our team!

George / Washington Univ / St. Louis: Yes, two Georges. Yes, three staff at Wash-U. This George leads faculty groups including groups at Lindenwood and St. Louis Metro, partners with our undergrad ministries at St. Louis University and Webster. All of his groups have gone virtual since last spring. George has a 15 year old grandson named Warren who is battling leukemia.

So here’s a picture I dug out of my CCC files from when I used to teach The Jesus Class. Jesus Class was a manuscript study on the Gospel of Mark – probably my favorite thing to teach ever. Back then we were trying to stream our events and classes online. People signed up for the class live and in person (at the Student Center apparently) but we were also trying to engage an entire online audience as well. I think this section of the Jesus Class had about a dozen in person participants and about 20 more online. Here’s what it took to do this in October 2012 (pink numbers from the pic):

1. One teacher. That’s me up on an empty stage in an empty room prepping for that evening’s session.
2. A plasma screen. Think of it as Screen Share – The participant would see me (like the person on the evening news) with this screen to the left of my shoulder.
3. That would be my i-Pad (which I still use to this day doing zoom sessions). What I wanted my live class and my online class to see was on my i-Pad. A PowerPoint slide deck. A manuscript of Mark’s gospel I could mark up with Notability. Resource sheets I wanted people to be able to refer to.
4. A black metal music stand. Anything I ever did in a church required a black metal music stand. (I still use one with my Nordic Track when I work out).
5. My lappy open to the web-page the class was being streamed to. I could read and respond to the chat from online participants. There was no video of my participants sitting in front of their devices like the Brady Bunch.
6. Camera pointed at me and my plasma screen. This is the video feed for the online participant. A camera operator was there with me.
7. The screen on the wall for my live participants sitting in the room (same thing as the plasma screen.)
8. Tables that my live students would be seated at. Zoom has chat-rooms, conference rooms have tables.
9. My sound and lighting guy was perched at the back of the room making sure everyone could see and hear and sending the audio feed to the camera operator who was streaming the feed.

Quite a few moving parts! We did this for 90 minutes a week. For 8 weeks straight. The in person audience was the glue for the rest of the class. Students were learning inductive study with a manuscript while learning the Gospel of Mark. The good old days!

Zoom these days…

Compare that with my virtual bible study experience this summer. As a part of our GFM Regional Staff Conference, I was asked to lead a 45 minute bible study in Second Peter. Talk about moving parts! Here’s what it looked like compared to vintage Jesus Class:

• Our virtual study had 47 participants logged in from 17 different states. It was a job-related conference – the participants did have to be there!
• I recruited an overall bible study leader, a technical assistant (to manage chat rooms) and 6 small group leaders.
• I had a small group leaders meeting in preparation for the study and went over a detailed teaching plan.
• I rehearsed the chat room transitions and screen sharing we’d be doing. We went over the Google-doc everyone would be using.
• Before the study we sent everyone an unmarked electronic copy of the manuscript and gave them access to the Google-doc.
• When the study happened it was great fun to see everyone (somewhere) on the screen. The main facilitator/leader was able to camp out near the Google-doc and see all the interaction being logged in via the chat rooms.
• We spent about half the time in small groups and had a great application session with everyone together blitzing the Google-doc. Check it out if you want to see the archive of the whole study!

Some features come with the Zoom model we weren’t able to leverage 8 years ago in Jesus Class. First of all, everyone has to show up in Zoom! Just streaming the feed from an event is pretty much the same thing as passive video-watching. With Zoom fellow participants can actually see you on the screen, you do have to show up!

Contribution is also more intentional in the Zoom environment. I do remember getting some comments from participants in Jesus Class. They would send their observations and questions in via the live chat. But a well laid out Google-doc draws people in much more. Boxes get filled in. As opposed to waiting for individuals to talk or finish their comment before someone else can contribute, the feedback table in a Google-doc is always being populated with input. Even marking up a manuscript in Zoom is possible in real time.

I’d be interested in your experiences with Zoom meetings, prayer gatherings and Bible studies. This is pretty much how most of our groups are now interacting. Let me know what you think.

“The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “when I will send a famine through the land– not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.” (Amos 8:11 NIV)

So, be honest… What has Covid 19 done to your eating, sleeping and exercise routines? Is your health index better or worse today than it was March 1st, 2020? In particular, what role has nutrition played in that? Are you eating well? Would you say you are enjoying meals these days?

Now that I have just turned off my readers, where am I headed with this? Christians have a biblical nutrition index not unlike our health index. Having a robust diet of truth from God’s word takes even more effort than eating right. Unlike our health index, which IS pretty visible to everyone who looks at us, our BNI (Biblical Nutrition Index) stays pretty invisible from others.

BNI requires a balanced diet of scripture with good habits of reflection and application. Like cooking for yourself, there are definite techniques that need to be learned. Meal planning, shopping, ingredients, food prep, seasoning, cooking, heating, cooling, stirring, pans, utensils, knives. The list can get pretty long, pretty fast. Ignoring the list means possibly eating a lot of the wrong things, eating things that taste horrible, eating too much, eating for the wrong reasons, and eating out. You can eat stuff that looks great in the package, but disagrees with your body. You can eat food that should be great, but evades your culinary gifts. You can just eat to fill your gut. You can eat in bad lighting, by yourself, with a mind full of unhelpful musings. There are a thousand ways to go wrong with food.

There are even more ways for Christians to go wrong with spiritual nutrition. It’s easy enough to say “I take God’s word into my heart every day in some form or another.” But what does that really look like? What’s the BNI value? We can get by with some of the worst habits. Sound biblical nutrition is born out of consistency and self-feeding skill. Most don’t actually know how to read the Bible. If scripture were a farmer’s market teeming with terrific produce, would we know what to buy? If we came home with shopping bags of phenomenal ingredients, would we know how to prepare them?

The choice to eat what others have prepared versus making our own dishes faces us every day. Truth be told, many can barely do “scripture ramen noodles” much less feed themselves a balanced diet. Self-feeding for most isn’t even a daily thing. We might hear a message online or at Church once a week. What would happen if we ate food once a week? And we wonder why “God doesn’t seem to make sense,” when he allows hardship into our experiences.

Cooking Class, not Fast-Food Dining.

My dream for north American Christians is that somewhere in their growth and development they could experience something like cooking class in their appetite for the Bible. Learning how to cook, not just eat. Self-feeding from scripture is not finding the best sermon online each week and enjoying the experience of listening to a message. Always having someone else spoon feed you the Bible is like always eating fast food. Christian, if you’ve done nothing but open your beak for your favorite pastor to drop in warm worms… little wonder you have a pathetic BNI.

The year 2020 will contain 366 days (what a fitting year to add the extra leap-year day). That means that there are 123 days left to this lovely year. Plenty of time to redeem your BNI before 2020 stops clubbing us. Between May 6th and Aug 14th, I spent 100 days reading my entire Bible. One hour of reading every day. I didn’t have a lot of time to study it. Just reading it and soaking it in. Anybody can do it. It’s had such an encouraging impact. Here are just few ways my BNI went up.

1. I spent one hour a day completely tuned out from distractions, at rest, with my mind engaged with the greatest story our planet has ever heard.
2. I gave myself direct nutritional input from God, not prepackaged, not shrink-wrapped, not dumbed-down, not predigested, no sugar added!
3. I replaced what otherwise might have been a wasted hour watching nonsense online, shopping, or fixing broken things around my house.
4. The whole story was in front of me – not just an isolated verse or passage. I had so many questions, struggles, and challenges in spite of what I already knew about this story. My theology got a good shake down!
5. I read all the parts of the Bible that are easy to ignore. I had no time to bask in “comfort food” or meander through my favorite books.
6. I marked up every page of the copy I was reading (NIV this time). Alert, active reading.
7. At the beginning I gave myself an assignment: search for one theme as I read all 66 books. I’m writing a book about that theme. I now have a good grip on what the whole Bible says about that one subject!

In the Old Testament, when something like a famine happened, God’s people took it as an act of sovereign judgment. It meant that their covenant with God had been broken by their unfaithfulness. It meant repenting. It mean lamenting. Amos 11:8 was one of those verses that jumped off the page at me during my 100 day read-thru. God sends a famine, not for food or water, but a famine for hearing his Word. That can’t be good!

Covid 19 has been a relentless dismantler. I think it’s left us in a near-famine, spiritually speaking. It’s taken apart so much of what we’ve always counted on. It’s exposed a lot of things we’ve foolishly neglected. Let’s rebuild our hunger for God. Remake our appetite around fresh commitment to learn and follow-through. Rather than focusing on how soon we can return to church buildings and in-person services, maybe the Holy Spirit is waiting on us to renew our habits of listening to God’s word.

Me, the 100 Day Read-Thru?

You can do this. Consider launching yourself on a 100 Day Read-Thru. Read your Bible an hour a day for a hundred days in a row. If you start sometime in the next three weeks, you’ll finish by the end of the calendar year! Let me know if you attempt it!

I hope you were able to make the best out of your summer. Here’s a random rant about mine, in no particular order. Covid made it hard to tell when summer started and mildly impossible to bring it to a close. I’d better call it a wrap and find a few things to look back on that were actually fun.

The deck was definitely stacked against the Perry family this summer. Let’s get the lamentable items on the table first.

1. We held out hope from March to May that we’d still get to go to Cedar Campus as a family. Our week on Lake Huron in late July never happened. Nothing but our deposit arrived in the U.P.
2. Silas’ graduation ceremony at Omaha Central High, postponed from May to July, was cancelled the week before it was supposed to happen. Purple cap and gown hung unused in the corner of our dining room all summer.
3. We’ve not attended Celebration Covenant or Mission Church in person for going on 22 weeks now. Virtual church is just not the same thing. Not even sure I’d call it “The Next Best Thing”. Covid’s gotta go…
4. Cheryl made the difficult decision to not renew her full time teaching position at Omaha Street School. Last year left her depleted. It’s taken most of the summer to replenish.
5. On the second day of the second week of Staycation, a distracted driver ran a red light and destroyed our trusty 04 Honda Pilot. We are without an SUV. Grieving. Trying to decide how (or if) to replace it.

A dozen cool things happened in spite of the pandemic!

• A somewhat low-key grad party with friends, neighbors and a food truck! Great fun to celebrate with Silas. He’s headed to Computer Engineering at University of Nebraska.
• Road trip with Aaron and his furniture from Urbana to Camrillo. Dodged dead armadillos on I-44 across Missouri. Enjoyed the landscape across New Mexico and Arizona. Savannah and Poppy joined us three days later. They’re Californians now!
• Managed to read my bible cover to cover in 100 days- starting May 6th. One hour a day. Marking it up looking for one theme: Rejection.

• Recruited very few new donors, but new dollars did come in and my budget was very nearly even at fiscal years end. Thank you Lord! Thank you ministry partners!
• My staff team all reported ending their ministry year in June encouraged and enjoying fruitful work in spite of campus shut-downs.
• Worked a lot on my back yard in time for Silas’ party. Planted some grass, rebuilt a fence, put up some cool lighting and fixed up my famous giant wire-spool picnic table.

• Spent a week in the city of St. Louis with Cheryl’s brother Steve helping him paint his soon to open restaurant. It’s a brilliant farm to table idea merging his dreams of ranching, dining and bringing justice to the city he loves!
• Had backyard breakfast with a young dad on Tuesdays. Catching up. Prayer. Blueberry pancakes. Coffee.
• Cheryl got part of her old job back at Omaha Street School… and a full time job offer from Omaha Bridges out of Poverty. Better schedule. Same overall pay.

• Family-pastor action with swell friends at a nearby lake this past Sunday. Baptized the dad. Dedicated the one year old. First Tapanga I’ve ever met in my life – what a fun name! Felt great to bless a young family and be outdoors.
• Went camping with Cheryl, Silas, his new tent and a couple of his friends down at Indian Cave State Park. a snorting dog tore through our campsite at 3am- ripped a stay right off our tent foyer. Woke us all up. Cheryl did scream slightly.
• Learned how to make stretch-bar canvas frames and rebuilt a Rochester two-barrel carburetor on my son’s 1974 Kurbmaster (the food truck at Silas’ grad party).

Hope you were able to defy Summer 2020 and have some fun!

Not sure if you’ve noticed this story in the news, but a recent decision by the current administration is putting International students at risk of finishing their programs in the US if the school they attend is moving to online only instruction starting this fall.

Graduate Faculty Ministries and ISM (International Student Ministries) are two field ministry groups that will significantly feel the impact of this. I would greatly appreciate you taking five minutes to read a Letter of Response from InterVarsity’s national leadership to the Department of Homeland Security. Its well done, offered in a spirit of respectful protest to the proposed policy change.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for praying for International Students!

Tonight, 6:30pm Central

Wanted to get a quick post out to you today.  I just noticed an event you might want to check out tonight.  It’s a Veritas Forum from MIT with a very interesting group of speakers!  The theme is Exploring Meaningful Work – click here for the details on the Veritas Forum website.  My GFM colleagues in Boston are sponsoring this event featuring former GFM staff member and author, Tish Harrison Warren.  If you want to attend tonight’s event you need to register on the Veritas Forum web-page above.

Reading Group this Sunday – 7pm

How’s that book coming along?  From a couple of posts ago, you might recall that I invited boilerroom readers to read a book with me (assigned reading for an upcoming staff conference).  Healing from Racial Trauma by Sheila Wise Rowe.  We’ll discuss the first half of the book this Sunday, June 28th at 7:00pm.  I will text the Zoom-room link to my PBR readers on the day of the book discussion!  Hope to see some of you there!

Parting Shot.  Fiscal Year End…

See my previous post on wanting to end my year in the black and working on next fiscal year’s budget.  Thanks to those who have been responding!  I’ve been receiving some encouraging one time donations!  Thank you!

Click here to be taken to Tim ‘s donation page on IV’s website.

Thanks for your prayers!  Have a terrific week!