This week, as Peter and I sat down to record the HRGS Update, we wondered what we would talk about. We felt like last week was such an uneventful week that we would not have much in the way of news for our listeners. Having been slowed down with some kind of bug that showed me a lot more mercy than it did Mildred, I was a little behind on just about everything last week. Then, of course there was the trip to Utila, which put me even further behind.

But, as you will hear, we just started in recording and soon discovered that there was plenty to talk about concerning HRGS, especially our exciting new programs. At the end, we mentioned that Emily Mitten was about to be induced so that she could deliver the remains of their baby. That happened yesterday and the baby’s remains as well as the placenta came out quicker than expected and with no serious incidents, praise the Lord. She is feeling much better, but the whole Mitten family needs our continued prayers for comfort and guidance.

Mildred is feeling considerably better this week. She was sick in bed most of the time last week with that respiratory bug that’s so popular around here right now. But we are both still coughing a lot, so it’s not all gone yet. It’s a good thing she’s feeling better now because it’s time for her to prepare the monthly financial reports that have to go to the home office. This is a time of the month when she puts in lots of extra hours at the station.

Last on my list is our resident visa application. We are still waiting for that mystery document that no one seems to be able to get for us. I’m hopeful that we will have it soon. In the meantime, I’m going to Tegucigalpa tomorrow morning to meet our new lawyer. You might remember that our previous lawyer left the firm to begin her own private practice. I have to take some papers to him and pay some fees. He and I will go together to immigration to renew our tourist visas. This time they will only be good for 60 days. Then, the next time, they will only be good for 30 days at a time. So this is going to get highly inconvenient if we don’t get our resident visas soon. Round trip plane tickets to Tegucigalpa are $215, so we can’t afford to take the passports there every month. Besides that, I can’t afford that much time away from work. That leaves one other option –  sending our passports via a regional airline to our lawyer so he can deal with them and send them back to us. And that provides lots of opportunities for our passports to get lost. So please pray that the Lord would light a fire under whoever is holding things up.

With all this sickness and the mess with immigration you might think we’d be down, but the Lord is sustaining us and giving us reasons to rejoice every day. Sandi told us that a listener came to the station the other day and said she is listening to us in both English and Spanish at the same time. She said her kids told her to make up her mind and listen to one or the other. Her response was, “You will never know what this station means to me!” Yes, I think I can get out of bed tomorrow and face another day. Thank you Jesus for letting us participate in Your work in the hearts of these precious people that You love so dearly!!

There’s never a dull moment around here – if you haven’t already figured that out. But I’m excited to be able to get this audio update to you so early in the week in spite of the busyness around here.

Peter is over in San Pedro Sula today, tomorrow, and Wednesday doing some video work for an evangelistic team sent there through our mission, Bible Basics International. The ministry is called STAR Teams and they have a little video on the BBI web site explaining the work. I had the privilege of narrating the video last summer. Check it out. Maybe you’d like to participate one of these times. Anyway, with Peter being gone, I’m getting extra opportunities to handle Sunrise Serenade this week as well as other studio work. This morning, when I got to the studio at about 5:30, we did not have any of the digital satellite downloads for the day because one of the wireless access points between buildings locked up. This particular one has a tendency to overheat, so Frederick Henderson had made a fan to cool it and the fan seized up. I found another one just like it and once I cleaned everything up and soldered the wires to the new fan, I could retrieve the files I needed.

Later, I made the cables we need, in order to connect the new AM computer to the new AM control console. I should be able to connect those tomorrow and finally hear the output from that system. The computer for the middle studio is nearly ready to install and then I’ll begin on the hard one – the present on-air computer replacement. Listen to the HRGS Update below to find out why.

All the while this is going on, I have preparations to make for replacing the guy wires and repainting the AM tower over on Utila. We are close to having the parts list ready. I mentioned a while ago that one of our supporting churches gave $3,000 toward that project. It looks like that will cover a large portion of the cost. We don’t have all the figures yet, but I estimate it will cost about another $2,000 beyond what the Lord has already supplied, so please pray that others will get involved. The project is tentatively scheduled for late September.

I mentioned the evangelistic team over in San Pedro Sula. Four members of the team, Travis Mitten, his brother, and two of his nieces will be coming to stay with us next week for several days. So Mildred has been busy making sure things are ship-shape for them. Travis’ wife, Emily, is doing ever so slightly better the past few days, but it’s a roller coaster ride for her with days of abject misery alternating with days of not as abject misery. But she is in good hands at her parents’ house. Unfortunately, it isn’t feasible for so many people to all be under the same roof, so their four girls are staying with their other grandparents who live an hour or two away. Not an ideal situation, but better than it might have been if they didn’t live so close to each other.

Now it’s time for supper. Bedtime, when I’m doing Sunrise Serenade, is 8:30 and that gets here in a hurry if I don’t watch out.

Aunt Cora

The good news is that we went to yet another funeral yesterday. Read on and you’ll understand why I call it good news. We’d been expecting this one for a while. Cora Wood was “Aunt Cora” to everyone who knew her. She had a special affinity for the teens of Oak Ridge and taught a teen Sunday school for many years. Her health and strength had been fading for the past three years and she finally went to be with her Savior and Best Friend in the wee hours yesterday morning. Most people are not embalmed here, so the funeral is usually within 24 hours or so of death. Even though she was bed ridden for a long time, she never stopped telling everyone she could about her Jesus. Whether someone called her on the phone or stopped in for a personal visit, Aunt Cora wove God’s love into every conversation because it was an integral part of her life.

Quite often there have been hysterical displays at the funerals we’ve attended, even those of believers. But we were greatly impressed by the comportment of everyone yesterday. Aunt Cora had a tremendous testimony and even though there were lots of tears, this funeral was a celebration of the happy home-going of a servant of the Most High. We rejoice for Aunt Cora, but we’ll miss her too.

Now here is the bad news. We got a very discouraging email yesterday from our immigration lawyer and we would appreciate your prayers. It is ten days until the third anniversary of our re-arrival here at Radio HRGS. Our resident visa application has been an uphill battle all the way. Yesterday we learned that Immigration has “expired” our application because it has taken so long for the Baptist Ministries lawyer to produce the last document we need for the application. So, we are starting all over again. To add to the aggravation, the government has made it even more difficult to renew tourist visas. In the past, it was a “simple” matter of going downtown repeatedly until you caught the immigration officer in his office. Once that was accomplished, you got the form from him and went to the bank and got in line there. Depending on the line, anywhere from a few minutes to an hour later, you paid the fees and took the form back to the immigration office. He put a new stamp on the little green visa paper stapled in your passport and away you went for 60 days. But now, he can no longer give you the stamp. You do everything else as before and then send your passport and the form to anyone in Tegucigalpa that you trust and they take it to the immigration office there to get the stamp and send it back to you. Every 30 days! We are not looking forward to doing that. I’m sure we can trust our lawyer there, but not so sure about the process of getting the passports back and forth. It is pretty expensive to fly to Teguce, but I am considering it. So we would very much appreciate your prayers on this matter. It is both inconvenient and discouraging.

For the rest of the news around here check out the HRGS Audio Update below. We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how this little program has taken off. Everywhere we go, people tell us they listen to it or they ask for updates on things we talk about on the program. It’s wonderful how interested our listeners are in the goings on around here. They often mention that they are praying for us too. I’m convinced that we could not do this without the prayers of our supporters and listeners.

We find ourselves back in Ohio this week at the farm where Mildred grew up. (I’m glad one of us grew up!) Our visit to Iowa was slightly longer than originally planned due to my mom’s hospitalization. We had originally intended to spend last Thursday settling in here and repacking for the short stay in Iowa, but Mom’s medical situation called for an immediate departure on Thursday morning from Ohio to Iowa. Now it looks like she’s patched up again and ready to go for a while longer. She’s had problems for many years with the arteries in her legs clogging up and had to have another angioplasty last week. A few hours after she got home from that, her heart started racing, so they brought her back and actually had to briefly stop her heart to get the rhythm back. She’s home now and will soon be talking to a specialist about a procedure to prevent any more episodes of tachycardia. In the meantime, they say that next time that leg artery closes off, it will mean bypass surgery. So we would appreciate your prayers, not just for Mom, but for the rest of the family for grace and wisdom – especially my sister Terry and her husband Howard who are the ones living closest and who play a huge role in keeping Mom healthy.

Now that I’ve spent a whole paragraph not dealing with the title of this entry, you might be wondering what in the world GDS³ stands for (GDS cubed for you non-mathematicians). Well, according to our station manager, Peter Silseth, GDS is short for “goofy dog syndrome.” He uses that term sometimes to describe their dog, Saydee. But she is not nearly as goofy as Lucy, Frankie, and Lady. They are Terry’s and Howard’s dogs. Lucy and Frankie are beagles and Lady, a labrador/springer mix, thinks she is a beagle. I’m pretty sure that Terry and Howard secretly feed them nitroglycerin, but I didn’t accuse them of it right to their faces. What a riot these dogs are! If they could talk they would be like those two ‘possums, Crash and Eddie, in the animated movie Ice Age 2 – Meltdown. Only there are THREE of them and they are way bigger than ‘possums.

But there is a magical incantation that always calms them. Howard shared it with me. Just yell “SQUIRRELS!” You might have to say it two or three times, but it’s guaranteed to make them run to the windows and make a frantic, but all too brief, search. The other thing you need to remember is that they don’t – remember that is. So, after about 15-30 seconds of looking out the windows for squirrels, they forget what they went to the windows for and resume chasing each other around and licking everyone in sight. But that’s not a big problem since, as I said, they don’t remember. Just yell “squirrel” again and off they go to the windows. It’s just hilarious.

Another of my sisters, Sandi, got to West Branch a few hours before we did, so it was a bit of a family reunion. We had a big meal on Easter with all of the above characters except the dogs, who were safely locked away in their kennels, plus my nephew Tim and his family, Casandra, Alex, and Albert. As you can see from the pictures, we all had a great time. We got to visit like we haven’t done in years and it was really sweet.

Now here we are, back on the farm, getting a little rest, visiting with supporters and family, helping prune the apple trees, and getting ready to speak this Sunday at Ebenezer and Williamsport United Methodist Churches. We’re just a little over one month from our return to the real world – Roatán – and we are beginning to long for our adopted home even amidst the great times we’re having here in the land of family and infrastructure.

[Show as slideshow]

Alrighty! Here is this week’s HRGS Audio Update and the story of Peter’s no-fun ending to a Sunday afternoon basketball game. I’ll let the audio speak for itself.

The news on my shoulder is that it’s doing much better. The doctor gave it a second injection yesterday and told me to keep throwing that ball at the wall. He also wants me to go swimming three times a week. I have NO idea how I’ll find time for that! I think I need a Wii. Anyway, I needed to pay for the medicine at the adjacent pharmacy after he finished with me. But I got to talking to some friends there in the waiting area. By the time I was ready to head for home, I had completely forgotten about that payment. I remembered it about the time I pulled into our driveway. So I went back this afternoon and settled accounts. It was a little embarrassing, but they we really nice about it.

Another nice news item from yesterday is that our lawyers in Tegucigalpa reported to me that they received the package I sent them last Friday with what we hope is the last batch of documents that the immigration office is asking for. Please pray that this is finally the end of the new requests and we can just sit back and prayerfully wait for final approval, which normally takes several months after they get the documents.

Well, enough rambling. Here is this week’s HRGS Update.