Visit from the Cross Family

     It all started close to 20 years ago now, when I worked at HMI, Honeyville Machinery Inc. I

On one of our many excursions to the waterfalls.

was repairing woodworking equipment and Joe Cross was the salesman for the company. Then as the company was being sold, Joe went to work for Honeyville Metal in the sales field and Karen and I bought Kurtz Custom Canvas. 10 years later when we opted to sell the Canvas Shop, Joe approached me about coming on board with Honeyville Metal to help him in sales with the Dust Collection portion of the company. That begin a 5 year working relationship with Joe that went deeper than your normal working friendship. Spending a lot of time together on the road working trade shows and sales calls gave us time to share about our kids, wives, churches, younger years, and older years ahead of us. We had many things in common and formed a tight friendship. Upon making the decision to go into full time missions in the DR. Joe was one of the first people that I told of our decision. He supported us fully and we continue to keep in contact through emails and occasional phone calls. It was a real treat for our family to have Joe and Alpha join us for 6 days last week and we had a great time showing them what we do, where we shop, what we do for fun (waterfalls). Even though the trip ended up with several getting sick,

Joe and Marcy taking a break on one of our hikes

we still consider it a great time. Of all the places we took them (even to a woodworking shop to look at their dust collector system), I have to say that the time spent on the front porch just visiting and catching up was the highlight of their trip for me at least. THANKS JOE AND ALPHA for taking the time out of your busy schedule to come, visit, and support us in what we do here. It meant a lot to us.

Beginning the living-room addition for Samuel and Maribel

     We continue to do well here. Karen keeps getting more applications for new children at Genesis, Marcy and I keep getting new calls for things that need fixed and Janae and Nina, well, they just keep doing the laundry and dishes. We have one more Outreach coming for 1 week next week and that will complete our summer teams. I will be running the construction site again with 2 young men, a 16 and a 17 year old. We will be working on the house of one of the teachers (Maribel) at Genesis. We started to do an addition onto their 2 bedroom, one bath, and kitchen. Hopefully by week end we will be able to put a roof over all of it.

Dominoes is a huge sport here. (even in the street at times)

    One area that you can be praying for the SI DR family is that we are beginning to look at exploring new possibilities to minister to the Dominicans. That can look many different ways and we want to be patient on God and follow His lead and not jump into something and then say "Here we go God, are you coming with us, or not?". Pray for guidance as we look into different options.