Saturday Afternoon and Sunday Morning were Faith-Stretching
After the prayer breakfast, we followed Chaplain David Hoy to his and Trisha’s home in Newtown Square – near Philadelphia)
We had never been to their home, so enjoyed a short tour and coffee and cookies before settling down to review a TFC PowerPoint presentation we had worked on at Camp Hebron several weeks ago – in preparation for a Mission’s Conference. I set up the slides, sent them copies, and they prepared the script.
However, when I tried to boot my laptop – there was nothing! It had crashed! After trying several times, we decided to call the technician who would be assisting us at church the next morning – to see if we could review it at church. Thankfully I had saved the program on a CD, because I wasn’t sure how the church wanted it (laptop or CD). He was not be available until 9 PM. That was too late for us.
I asked if they had any friends who had a laptop. They immediately thought about their friend, Mark. He did, and after asking me a few questions, we decided it would probably work – it did!
By this time it was late afternoon, so we decided to review the presentation – so I could coordinate the slides with their script.
Trisha in the kitchen and David slicing subs.
The first review went pretty well, but we decided we wanted to do it one more time. Before that, they served us a delicious, supper. Following the second review, we felt ready for the morning service.
We arrived at Aldan Union Church, Alda, PA, during the early service on Sunday, set up the TFC display in the room where the other missionaries had their displays, then waited for the fifteen-minute break between church and Sunday school – which was our time to set up our PowerPoint in the sanctuary. David and Trisha were speaking to the Adult Sunday school class of about 500 people.
We got to the front of the sanctuary where the technician was busy working on the missionary’s presentation who would follow us. He was having trouble getting that one to work, but finally it was our turn. He chose the CD I had along, but for some reason his computer couldn’t read it, so I turned on my borrowed laptop – and finally – one minute before the presentation – our PowerPoint was on screen!
As soon as that presentation was over (it went incredibly well, and nobody knew what we had been through!), we went next door to show it to the Adult Special Needs Sunday school class of a dozen people. That one was done on a large TV, and was particulary rewarding because they loved the pictures and asked lots of questions.
Finally, it was time to go to the second service, relax, and enjoy someone elses efforts! We were blessed to hear James O’Neill, President of CrossWorld. He gave us a lot of really good challenges on missions, but what I remember most is this one:
He once read that Coke has a goal of having a Coke machine in every village in the world. Why does the Christian Church not have a goal of having a fellowship of believers in every village in the world? (Now we knew why there was a can of Coke near the pulpit! It was his visual for the morning.) He mentioned that he had visited a lot of villages in the world, and many of them do have Coke machines, but there are still two billion people who have not heard about Jesus.