The New Year has arrived and with it, the natural tendency both to look back and reflect as well as to look ahead in anticipation. Let’s give you a quick recap as well as an update on preparations:

2014… the Blog

From a blogging perspective, the year was a good one according to the statistics monkeys at WordPress.com… the following numbers are from them:

• The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. AIMLong.ca was viewed about 10,000 times in 2014 so if the blog were a concert at the Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it! (That’s pretty cool!)
• There were 301 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 109 MB. That’s about 6 pictures per week.
• The busiest day of the year was January 18th with 479 views (the day we launched our Intro Video).
• The Top-5 posts of the year were:
  #1 – Intro Video  (438 views)
  #2 – Got a Call? Feed it!  (332 views)
  #3 – #IAmGlobal  (179 views)
  #4 – Letter from my Pastor  (176 views)
  #5 – A Hallelujah Moment!  (158 views)

Thank you, WordPress… for being a great blogging platform!

2014… the Project

With the help of the Lord we…

• Raised commitments for over $96,000.00 toward our $120,000.00 goal.  This is what we will live on for the next two years, if the Lord tarries.
• Received monthly commitments & one-time offerings from 0ver 100 churches, groups or individuals.
• Traveled 20,000+ km throughout the States and Eastern Canada.
• Presented our Vision in 38 church services in 22 cities.
• Connected with other AIMers and Global Missions staff.
• Have gotten to know and been encouraged by incredible pastors and individual supporters from across North America!

Fear & Answered Prayer

We constantly find that fear is “nipping at our heals” concerning the sale of our house. We find ourselves, on one hand, wanting to make contingency plans in case it doesn’t sell before our departure but on the other hand, we don’t want to lack (or appear to lack) faith that God is able to work the sale out (despite a poor real estate market and a less than ideal time of year).

That being said, there was a very favourable showing before Christmas (they have to get their house on the market) and there is a showing today. We have said for some time that we are praying for 2 very interested parties who will bid against each other in the hopes of moving the timeline forward sooner. This showing today, is an answer to prayer.

Prayer Alert: So….. Those of you reading this before 2pm Atlantic time, please pray for this viewing. Thanks!

Furniture… on the move!

We will be making our first trip “to the shed” today with some of the larger pieces of furniture that will spend the next two years “locked away”. This means that yesterday in particular…

• a great number of boxes were filled
• a long day was stretched late into the evening
• Value Village will soon see several bags of books
• the Church flea market will inherit a few boxes and last, (but not least)…
• the local landfill will see a good number of things that we’ve never had the guts to throw out sooner… can someone say…. P-U-R-G-E!!

Final mailout

 The other thing that we managed to get done between Christmas and New Year’s, was to prepare and mail out our final packet before departure.

The mailing consists of two (2) printed copies of the “Praying for our AIMKids“ infographic that you saw last week. Each of our partners willl receive one as well as other pastors across North America that we’ve had contact with at various points..

The Goal, if you recall was to (a) recruit prayer supporters for our kids and (b) provide pastors and Sunday School or youth personnel with a way to get kids connected to missions.

Here you can see Dominic & TImo hard at work helping me stuff the envelopes… they’re troopers!

 Coming up…

A few things on the horizon for this week:

• January 7th: Watch out for our next AIMKids MIssionary Moment post, entitled 5 Changes (I think, as a rule, I’ll publish those Missionary Moment posts on Wednesday)
• January 8th: Our last visit with the folks at Stephenson Tower. This will be tough as we’ve been visiting them for the past 6 years or so.
• January 11th, at 6:30pm, there will be a send off service at Mission Point (130 Mark Drive, behind Downey Ford).

Thank you for your prayer support again this week!
You open doors for us!