Hello and Glad Tidings to Our Friends!
With this letter we greet each of you with warm hearts and real appreciation for your care for this nursing home ministry! Dar and I are carried through each month by the love and grace of our Creator, Father God, and you are tangible expressions of His encouragement for us to press on. Our commitment to the assignment He has given us is a gift – we are aware of His sustaining grace and His faithfulness to us. At the same time, the practical resources needed to carry out our commitment is His blessing also!
Over the years He has blessed us, usually through His children, with several cars, necessary finances to carry on the “business”, crucial assistance in the legal process of setting up the ministry, printing equipment, office space, print shop space, open doors in numberless nursing homes, computers, copiers, file cabinets, desks, furniture, the ability to purchase a home, the materials and help to build a prayer room/print shop in our back yard, help in setting up and maintaining our website, office supplies, volunteers to lend a helping hand, and maybe most importantly, friends who love us!
We are asked sometimes how we are able to give away our nursing home ministry resources at no charge. Essentially, our answer is that we are not good fund raisers, but our Heavenly Father is! We have never accepted a request for free materials that we have not been able to provide. We have never had a bill that our Father hasn’t paid!
When this ministry was initiated in 1991, we had no clear strategy or business plan to go by – we were not sure where our efforts would lead, which is not to say we did it the way it should be done. But God took willing hands and a lot of prayer and made something from nothing for His glory and for the sake of His children in care facilities all over this great Country! He is, indeed, all in all.
When the Lord brought us together in marriage in 1997, neither of us really had a clear picture how our relationship and Christian Concourse would get along. Let us put it this way: Jerry had a lot of ideas he wanted to develop, but he was too busy running around doing “ministry” to actually start developing resources to aid others in their ministry. Of all of the materials we now provide by mail or by download from our website, everything took concrete form since our marriage – Dar is the anchor for Jerry’s tendency for too many “good ideas.”
Dar has been a steady support and catalyst through all of our projects, strengthening Jerry to stick it out with each one. All of our major endeavors to produce materials have each taken at least a year. Many of you have stuck by us through all of this. We say, again, “Thank you!” from the bottom of our hearts. Love to our precious Father God and love to you, His children, who are the salt and light of this fallen world.
Sincerely, in the Name of Jesus,
Jerry and Dar Johnson