March 4, 2008

Dear Fellow-saints,

We greet you as saints because of His grace, mercy, and love that has bestowed this position upon you. None of us deserves this title, that's for sure! As we get older and understand life and His holiness a little better, we marvel at how He could love us as He does. So much for the sermon. I will get on to the news for the month.

As usual, we had a very busy month in February. We preached at five different churches during the month. Most of the works are doing well. We are thinking about merging the Altos do Coxipo Church with its mission. The location of that church is not good. It is in a dangerous place. We are still praying about this. The Boa Esperanca Church will have their 30th anniversary this year. Richard Turner was their first pastor, I believe. Bobby Creiglow built the building with his own hands. John Hatcher came with Brother Turner in the middle 70's to Cuiaba to start up this work. I have on two occasions pastored there while they looked for a pastor. They now have a good Brazilian pastor, Paulo Ricardo Goncalves. This is a good strong church who holds to the truth.

We are still trying to sell the worker's house up in Novo Diamantino. We need to do some work on the church building and we are waiting for this to happen to have the funds to do it. The weak dollar exchange is really starting to limit what we can do here. We don't want to complain, but it really has become a factor and a problem in some ways. Let us all pray for America. She is taking a beating economically and politically around the world. Our prayer is that this will cause God's people to cry out to Him. We need mercy to be bestowed upon us. We are going away as a nation from the ways of the Lord.

This month Ursula and I will be making a quick trip to the USA to sign her up for Medicare and sign us both up for our Social Security pensions. We will attend the Spring Conference in Lexington in April and come on back here to Brazil the end of May. We plan a furlough the end of September, at which time we hope to visit some of you who support our work and BFM. We hope Ursula will be able to travel with us most of the time. She has good days and bad days. Her arthritis is getting worse.

We appreciate your faithful support. May the Lord richly bless you all.

Yours in Him,

Harold and Ursula Draper