*Read all about what we have been up to this past Fall and early Winter!
Dear Family & Friends & VALUED Supporters, Dec./Jan./Feb. 2024
Happy New Year – 2024! The time keeps ticking…..tik, Tok, tik, Tok. We know our time is short to serve Jesus here on earth. So, it is with FERVOR that we continue to extend ourselves to exhaustion to continue to print, cut, collate, stitch and cut again, box, and ship millions of Smiley Gospel Tracts and now thousands of John & Romans with the Gospel in the front of them. In the midst of it all, we manage to keep up our travels to churches that request meetings with our family. We enjoy singing together and always feel a loss when one of our children grow up and leave our singing group. However, we have NO greater JOY than to hear that our children walk in truth! This past Fall, we had over a dozen of churches we traveled to for special meetings. We are thankful that three of those churches took us on for financial support. What a blessing! To purchase the paper, ink, chemicals and parts for the printing presses (to keep them running smoothly) is a big expense. It is also not cheap to run the electric and heat in our print shop. We are thankful to watch God provide for us through His generous people.
This past Christmas Season, we enjoyed going to three different police stations and two fire stations to deliver Christmas cookies with thank you notes (for their service) along with Gospel Tracts. We also sang for them. It was also a blessing to go Christmas caroling in our neighborhood while giving each home a Gospel Tract and an invite to a Christmas party at our home. We had lots come, but especially a lot of our Amish neighbors. They enjoyed it SO much, that they asked us to come and sing for a big Amish event they had. We are striving to be a light also in our neighborhood and encourage them to look inward to be sure it is not any of their works they are trusting in to get them to Heaven, but ONLY in the shed Blood of Jesus Christ! Thank God, He was born to die to redeem us from eternal damnation. What a Saviour! 2024 is already filling up with loads of work for Eternal purposes….but it is rewarding and we would not want to be doing anything else with our time.
We watch our children continue to grow in leaps and bounds and dread the day when our house is quiet with no echoes of little voices filling every nook and cranny of our home. We don’t mind the spilled milk or the scratched floor. We LOVE every moment of being parents to each one of our children, and our deepest desire is to see our efforts multiplied as they go forth as arrows and hit their mark. May they also do MIGHTY things for Jesus, and we will sit back with warmth in our aging hearts, knowing that every effort made, every prayer prayed, every tear shed, every moment of no sleep, every family meal and devotion time… was worth every moment to raise a generation for the cause of Jesus Christ! Even now, the ones still at home, are storing treasures in Heaven as they help us with SO many facets of our ministry!
With that said, we SAVOR each precious moment with them.
1) Recently, Janessa wanted to pretend to do my makeup. She commented that she was now going to do my “eyebrowns”! She also calls eyelashes – “blinks”.
2) Our children love to take bike rides when the weather is nice. There is a local soda machine nearby and one day they went and got sodas. Upon arriving back home, they showed me what sodas they had gotten. Most of them had chosen root beer. Janessa proclaimed to me, “Beer is my favorite!” LOL. Oh, how I cherish the innocence!
3) One Sunday I was not able to attend church due to Janessa & Olivia being sick. When the family got back home, David told me that our church had the Lord’s Supper that morning. A bit later, we overheard Sadie telling Olivia that they had done the “Bread & Breakfast” while at church.
4) When we take our little girls potty in public restrooms, we are VERY particular about guarding against germs and taking precautions to avoid coming in contact with them. When I was about to put Janessa on a public potty, she asked me, “Mama, are there ‘Germans’ on this toilet?” Oh My! LOL.
5) Janessa recently proclaimed that she did NOT want to grow up and leave me! She said she is SO glad that she was born in the Ro g rigues family! Lastly, she recently saw a moth flying in our house. She told her siblings, “I saw a muffin flying around.”
6) On Thanksgiving, we had a houseful of Jill’s extended family over. What a TREAT it was to have them all here for a few days! Jill’s DEAR sister Amy (who is in a wheelchair as a quadriplegic due to a bad car accident 8 1/2 years ago) was here with her husband and their six children. We all had assigned seating for our Thanksgiving Feast. I had written a tag for Amy’s place setting, and I had written a note next to her name – “Our Role Model”. Sofia read that and contemplated what it meant. She explained to her older sister Sadie that Mama had written “role model” by Aunt Amy’s name, because she ROLLS around in a wheelchair and she is a MODEL! SO precious…..and true! A new definition of ROLE MODEL” has been made. LOL.
We LOVE and appreciate each one of you and hope you have a WONDERFUL 2024!
Serving Jesus With Joy, The Rodrigues Family Titus 2:12-14