Dear Family and Friends:
Thank you—for your part in enabling Cindy and me to be obedient to the call of God!
Did you know:
On a daily basis, the thing I spend most of my time doing is setting up appointments with potential ministry partners. Our current ministry partners and friends are our source for meeting these people. Often I'm on the telephone intermittently from 9AM to 9PM , and meeting with people here in town, or in Augusta , Atlanta , Macon , Columbia , Greenville , Charleston or Charlotte . Please pray for my safety, and for efficient use of time.
Support appointments are always divine appointments. It's very easy to see that when a church or individual encourages us in the Lord or we're able to encourage them. But we're also sensitive to the opportunity to counsel the individuals we meet with on anything from mission strategy to marital relationships. Very recently, I had the opportunity to share Christ with the very individual with whom I was meeting. Although this person has been active in church and short-term missions, assurance of salvation was something missing from his life. Please pray that I’ll be more sensitive to opportunities like this and “be prepared in season and out of season,” as the Bible says.
On every appointment, we are giving individuals the opportunity to be involved in God's work and are multiplying opportunities for worship. The intimate meetings we're usually involved in are unique settings for God to do His work: if someone supports our work, it's completely between that person and God, since the receiving body is an anonymous entity (Campus Crusade for Christ) and there is no audience. Perhaps that's why individuals sometimes feel freer to discuss things with us. Please pray the Lord will continue to remind us of this perspective.
Another daily part of our ministry is counseling in the response center. In the last two months, I've personally seen 48 people receive Christ for the first time. I'm only one of over 300 volunteers, maybe (hopefully) including some of you who receive this letter. If you've gone through the training for the Response Center recently, you may have noticed the tremendously-encouraging latest statistics: it states that 685 people each day are indicating first-time decisions for Christ! What a great harvest! What a fulfillment of Christ's prophecy, "If I be lifted up from the earth, [I] will draw all men to me." (John 12:32) Because that's what we do! We use the name of Jesus, and simply exalt Him through what the Bible says about Him...then He draws seekers (kind of a better name than "surfers," don't you think?) to Himself through us. Please pray for our sensitivity and timeliness in doing the Lord’s work worldwide in this unique field.
I'm also privileged to get to share with you the exciting news that we have 90% of our ongoing support pledged today. When we joined staff some time ago, Crusade set goals for us, not according to our resume but according to prayerfully-arrived-at ongoing support numbers designed to provide a modest, middle-income in Orlando for our family.
They also set a goal for special gifts (irregular contributions) which are separate from our main support goal because they can't be used toward our ongoing goals but help to defray our expenses as we raise our support full-time. This special goal was met quite some time ago. That's why we ask everyone we meet with to consider investing long-term with us, even if it's at a much smaller amount. (Because even small, monthly amounts move us ever-closer to our ultimate goal.)
Please pray for all of our ongoing pledges to come in before the end of November! We have been encouraged to visit Orlando again to begin looking for a home. We're asking the Lord to lead us to the right area of the Orlando metro area to settle and raise our family.
If you would like to help us, one important way to do that, in addition to your prayers and support, is by referring us to others with a heart for world missions. (Even if you have friends who live thousands of miles away!) Another important way you can help is through regular prayer. We've been giving some thought to this lately, and we would appreciate prayer in the following specific areas:
- Pre-emptively for sustained vision, energy and health, for all of us. If you have an encouraging word, please forward it! Believe me, the enemy really wants us to lose steam right now, when victory is in sight! As always, if you have a question, please ask it. We want you to know what we do and how we do it, so that you'll be better informed in how to pray for us.
- Sustained commitment from your fellow-laborers. We have a few partners who have made commitments and not yet fulfilled them. Others who have made commitments and are experiencing opposition in following through. Still others are in various stages of consideration. We completed an interactive CD-ROM share tool a few weeks ago and sent it to a few who have been unable to meet with us but were willing to consider partnership. Please pray they will prayerfully view this and consider our ministry through this project in which we invested much work. I can't help but think that our partnership is not only for time, but for eternity; and that we will have reason to rejoice together in God's Kingdom, when everything is made clear to us.
Thank you for your prayers for Luke's allergy and eczema conditions. He's doing much better! Emily and Luke are both doing well, in fact, and learning and growing up so quickly! They are both enjoying the AWANA program at a local church, and Emily has personally caught two Green Tree Frogs for us to keep as an ideal (non-allergenic) pet. This month, we added a box turtle that the kids and I rescued from the road. Emily has named her "Hannah." One of the tree frogs is named "Green Hopper" or just "Hop" for short. Emily is in a brand-new local Christian school's first grade, (with two other first-grade girls), half-days during the week. Luke is learning so much every day and is becoming quite an artist.
If you have an e-mail address and we don't have it, why don't you send us a message at mike.skinner@ccci.org or cindy.skinner@ccci.org? Please tell us any prayer requests that you may have. It would be so good to hear from you!
Love,
Mike and Cindy
”One Day Closer” ( Rom. 13:1)
