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I want to take a few moments and thank you all for being a part of Refreshing Hope Ministries, and to let you know what all has been going on here over the last couple of months. Sylvia and I are doing well and working many things which I will share with you in this news update. While praying about what to write, heard “ninety-nine.” Then this scripture came to mind:

Matthew 18:12–14 (NKJV) — “What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them goes astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine and go to the mountains to seek the one that is straying? And if he should find it, assuredly, I say to you, he rejoices more over that sheep than over the ninety-nine that did not go astray. Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.”

Even though the man in the parable had ninety-nine sheep left, he would still go after the one that had gone astray. That one sheep was special to Him, just as each of us are. Time and time again in my life, the Lord has sent me after the ones that no one wanted: the broken, the outcast, the lost, those who were driven away. In fact, I grew up as one, so I understand them. 

Years ago when I was laid off from my supervisor’s job, I thought that the Lord was going to promote me and maybe give me a job in a Christian bookstore. That is where I saw myself: in a Christian environment, reading Christian books, and talking with Christian people while listening to Christian music. I envisioned a quiet and meditative environment. So holy…looking back now, I realize that was silly. That is not what Jesus did. He spent His time with the Father, and with the sinners, bringing them back to God. He said that it is not the healthy that need a physician, but the sick, and those are the ones He went after. 

Instead, after my unemployment ran out, the Lord thrust me into the darkest hole-in-the-wall job that I could imagine at a brass polishing plant in a 100-year-old building. It was not just a dark, musty, and dirty workplace, it was spiritually dark as well. We slaved at machines in a 110 degree building covered in brass dust and black buffing compound, death metal blared over the roaring machines. People did drugs openly and shared them with the manager. Everyone there was just hanging on for another week, until a door opened to get out of there. God’s name was mentioned all the time, but only when cussing.  

I had a new house that I was about to lose and I needed the money. It was hard, dangerous work. More than once the machine snatched a huge tub faucet out of my hand and then slammed me in the chest with it, knocking me down. I went into a survival mode and made the best of it. I had prayed a lot about it, and I knew that I was supposed to be there. I just didn’t know why at the time. 

It was the lost sheep. Everyone there was utterly hopeless with very little reason to live. It was skid row. I just worked at my machine, prayed in the Spirit, fasted a lot, and listened the Bible all day. One day when I was working at the machine, I felt something like oil being poured over my head and I spun around thinking someone was pulling a prank on me, but there was no one there. Soon after, things began to change. I was rapidly promoted from the machine, to fork lift driver, to foreman, then to manager. The people and the environment began to change around me. People began to come to church with me. The Bible played over the intercom. Scriptures were posted on the walls and the machines instead pictures of naked women. Cussing was replaced with praying, and in the morning before we started to work, we would all join hands in a circle and pray together. 

God sent me into a dark place after the lost sheep, and He turned that into a Christian environment. Now I thank God that He did not send me to work in a Christian bookstore. He has a pattern of doing this. He kept me in a Southern Rock band long after I was attending Bible college. I played bars every weekend until I led the guitar player to Jesus, then He released me. He loves that one lost sheep. 

I said all of that to say: the Lord has always used me beyond the walls of the church, and rarely inside of it. My sermons have always been delivered in the workplace, in bar parking lots, wherever I was when His word came down. He pushed me into my own computer business for almost twenty years, then He opened the door into ministry. Holding true to form, it was completely online, and over the Internet using the skills that He taught me along the way. He is still using us today to seek the lost, the broken, the strays, the outcasts. That is what Refreshing Hope Ministries is all about. 

I don’t know what the long term plan is for us, but one thing is consistent: we will be seeking the lost, and doing our best to restore hope to those who have none. The devotionals that the Lord has given me are reaching into prisons, and spiritually dark places. We have inmates writing us and requesting more, and we try and write them back and send them one of our books. I am just so thankful to be on His bus. He can drive it wherever He wants, and at the speed that He wants to. 

Live meetings:

We are having a fun time with the live meetings twice a week now. It is a completely interactive church service over the Internet utilizing a chat room and a live video feed. We have live praise and worship music, and members can ask questions, or request prayer, and we pray for them in real time during the live stream. People who have no church, are now able to be a part of one right in their homes, and to make other Christian friends. It is becoming a place to belong. 

The disabled can attend church right where they are. We meet on Wednesdays at 7PM EST and Saturday at 4 PM EST. It is not uncommon for us to have people join us from Sweden, South Africa, India, and across the USA all in one church service. It is beyond the church walls. You can join us by clicking “Watch” on the menu of the refreshinghope.org website. We recently made changes to the live streaming and moved to a streaming server right here in South Carolina, so it is much smoother than it used to be. If you had problems participating in the past, please try it again and let us know if it works better for you. We appreciate your feedback.

On Wednesday night, we have started having guest speakers. Right now we have a couple of volunteers. If you are interested in speaking on a Wednesday night, able to record a 15 minute video of your message beforehand, and able to attend the Wednesday night meeting so that you can answer people’s questions about it, then let us know. We welcome the help. 

Here are links to our past meetings:

The Videos are here (Teaching Only): 

Videos only: https://vimeo.com/refreshinghope 

Blog and Video: http://www.refreshinghope.org/blogs?owner_id=1&category=21 

The Audio is here (Entire service start to finish): http://www.refreshinghope.org/pages/audio-archive

Bible Study:

We are doing an online, interactive Bible study on Saturday evenings at 4PM EST. Currently, we are going through the book of Luke one chapter at a time. I take the chapter apart verse by verse and provide maps, history and important details. Then you get to take a quiz on the chapter and answer twenty questions on what you learned. It is a fun, interactive way to learn the Bible. The quizzes are on the menu, or you can click this link: http://www.refreshinghope.org/quizzes

Music:

We have begun to open the live services with praise and worship, as I have been a musician all my life, but mostly played bass guitar. As I began to work on cover songs, the Holy Spirit suddenly began to give me my own songs. I was surprised. They began to come to me like the devotionals, sometimes while just laying in bed. It begins as a seed, and as I write them down, a song comes out of it. I have written over 20 songs over the last four months or so. At first they sounded pretty rough, so I began taking singing lessons to improve and I am trying to get better, and unlearn all the bad habits that a lifetime of playing by ear brings with it. I believe that we should work with God to become the best servant that we can be. 

Some of the members began to ask for a CD of my songs, and as I began trying to record some of them, I met Perry, who is a member of RHM and a great guitar player but lives in Texas while we are in South Carolina. So I set us up a way to share the files, and I record them and send them to him, he plays along with it, records it and sends it back. So now we have kind of a worship team started over the Internet, which appropriately fits an online church. The songs are sounding better. We have had to purchase all sorts of music equipment to keep up with where the Lord seems to be taking us, like in-ear monitors, microphones, and recording software. We are taking it one day at a time and gathering things as we can. 

Server status:

Over the last few months, the main RHM web server that hosts the website, the devotionals, and the live meetings, began hard freezing randomly with no reason. We changed the memory, swapped the drives, reapplied thermal paste to all the heat sinks, everything that we could think of, but it kept randomly freezing without leaving a trace as to why. I am thinking that it was the mainboard. So we scrapped some parts together and built another one to replace it. Someone sent us a donation to help, and we managed to buy a couple of solid state hard drives for it. Right now, it seems to be working better, faster, and this one is not freezing. 

The thing is, all of our servers and spare parts are from around 2006 to 2008, so about 9 to 11 years old now. In computer years, they are all obsolete. We like to keep a spare server around in case one fails, so we can just swap the hard drives and get back online as soon as possible, without having several days of downtime while we wait for parts to ship. 

This means that when we do go to upgrade to a newer generation of servers, that we have to buy at least 2 of them, and commercial servers that are built to run 24/7 are expensive. The ones that we are using now sold new for around $12,000 each, but the Lord pretty much gave us a stack of them! To get anything decent, we are talking about $5,000 each. That is well beyond our means at the moment, so we are limping along with what we have until the Lord makes a way for us to do better. 

Our ISP recently upgraded the Internet in our area and we now have a 300 / 20mbs connection, with the possibility of getting fiberoptic here. They are currently looking into it. Please remember that in prayer. If we could get fiber here it would vastly improve our live streaming events as well as sending the thousands of emails that go out every day. Everything would be faster. 

We have set up an RHM network monitor at pingdom: http://stats.pingdom.com/ry4mdk5x7pg0  You can visit our monitor page and see whether the RHM servers are up or down at any time if you are having problems connecting to us. 

Problems:  

This year has been one of the most expensive that we have ever had. Our bathrooms started overflowing, so we called a septic tank service to look at it. Roots had grown through the field line and stopped it up. It was a Christian company, they had: “By His amazing grace” on their estimates and their t-shirts and they told us about Jesus. We decided that it would be good to do business with a Christian company, so we gave them the job of putting in a new field line for us. 

When they backed in with a dump truck full of rock, they backed over the septic tank and caved it in. Then they pulled their truck out, asked for their check, and said they would call us tomorrow about fixing the lid. And we never heard from them again. So for the next two weeks, we had an open septic tank in the front yard, and the nice Christians that told us about Jesus would not take our calls, or return them. You can believe me that your actions tell me a lot more about your faith, than your mouth. We got another company to come and fix the septic tank, and by the end, we had spent about $3,000 dollars in our front yard. Then the compressor on our refrigerator died. Here is a photo:

Books: 

We have just released a new book called: “Forty Days of Fasting”. It is a book about fasting, but also a day-by-day journal from my own life while on a forty-day fast. I share some things in this book that I have never shared anywhere else. It also contains most of what I know about fasting, what the Bible teaches about it, and what I have discovered be experience in my own life, as well as the trials and struggles that you will face during a long fast. The paperback is on Amazon now and the Kindle should be within a couple of days:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1977573223

We are almost finished with another book: Forty Days of Love. This is forty-day devotional that focuses on the unchangeable love of God for us. 

Visitors:

We have had a few visitors over the last couple of months. Sylvia’s Mom and Stepdad came to see us. They live in California and have never touched the Atlantic ocean, so we took them to Myrtle Beach. It was a stormy, rainy day, that turned the umbrellas inside out, but we did not let that stop us. Here is a picture:

Also we had a couple of our members from RHM stop by to see us while they were traveling on vacation, Linda, Chuck, and their dog Benji. It was fun catching up and meeting them in person. 

Thank you:

I just want to say thank you so much for those that take a moment out of their day to encourage us, send us a card, and those that support us. We could not do any of this without you. I know that God has great things in store for RHM and we so appreciate each of you that have stood by us through the hard times. If you are in need of prayer, we are here for you! I have long wanted to be available to those that consider us their pastors, but when you have tens of thousands of readers, you can’t really give out your cell phone number to everyone. Its just not smart. So I have came up with a compromise and included my cell phone number at the bottom of the donation receipts. If you need to talk to me, give me a ring. If you are a supporter of RHM and you don’t have my number, just send me an email and ask for it. 

If you need prayer, just click on the Prayer link on the website menu (you will need to be logged in). Here also is the direct link: http://www.refreshinghope.org/pages/prayer. For our prayer warriors, if you are interested in joining our prayer team, please do contact us.

Many thanks to each of you for being part of Refreshing Hope Ministries. We pray for each of you daily, and are very grateful for the group that God has put here.

Pastor Dion