November Prayer Letter
Dear Pastor and Friends,
We are eager to share with you what the Rodriguez Family, your missionaries to Panama, have been up too. We arrived to the States on Sept. 18th. We were able to enjoy some time with family for the rest of September while visiting nearby churches at the same time. We took off traveling in October. So far we have visited churches in FL, IL, MN and MI. The next couple of months we have plans to visit churches in North/South Carolina as we make our way back to Florida where we will be spending Christmas with my wife’s family. We also have Louisiana and Texas on the schedule to visit after Christmas.
What brings us to the United States? In July we were partially evicted from the building that we have been renting. We were asked to leave from the upstairs part of the building which left us scrambling to look for classrooms for our nursery and sunday school classes as well as for a place that could be used for our New Life’s Children’s Feeding Center.
We are thankful for a faithful lady in our church who opened up her house so that we can use her porch, garage area, and yard for our sunday school classes. We also reconstructed a little room in the downstairs auditorium to be used for the nursery. The Lord opened a door in a nearby area where we are able to rent for our feeding center.
What’s the next move? Well, although we got rearranged from the eviction, we feel that it will not be long before the owners evict us from the downstairs as well. We have been looking at land to buy and we have a few options available. We started selling food, recycling cans to raise money to buy the land but with the low income of our people there’s just not enough coming in. So we decided to visit as many of our supporting churches as possible in the short amount of time we have in the states to ask for help! So far we have raised over $10,000 which is more than what we had but we still need to raise that amount.
We are not able to get to all of our supporting churches so we are using this means of communication to ask you to pray and see how and if God would allow you to help us.
We are pleased to share that while we are in the states the Lord’s ministry back home keeps moving forward. During these last two months we have received reports of over 150 people who have decided to follow Jesus. Last Sunday the report was 173 in attendance, 23 visitors, and 6 baptisms! We are thankful for the people that God has given us in our church and for their willingness to keep on serving Him even in our absence.
Our New Life Children’s Feeding Center is marching on in the new building we are renting. The children are getting their food both physically and spiritually. Although we will not be back in Panama for Christmas, we have already started the plans for their big Christmas party. It is an exciting time for those kids!
We appreciate prayers for us while we are traveling, last weekend we were driving in snow. Please pray for the Lord to open doors and to speak to hearts. We are excited that at least one church has taken us on for support with another church that has expressed their desire, Lord-willing, their faith promise goes up.
We encourage you to plan a visit with us in Panama to see for yourselves what God is doing in this small country in Central America. Thank you for your faithful prayers and support. God bless!
Sincerely your servants in Christ,
Rafael, Tracy, Evelyn, Emily, Rafael Jr., and Elisabeth Rodriguez
