Dear Friends,

Seven years have now passed since the Lord prompted me to take the first step toward establishing MetroWest Caribbean Mission on the shores of Puerta Plata Province in the island nation of Republica Dominicana. Little did I know that on the same beach where I would be running, while training for my first long distance race, a Christian woman named Hilda Kingsley would be crying out to God to send someone to help the people of her village, Boca Nueva. In those early days, I met Jose Kingsley, Hilda's father, her mother Lydia, and her preacher aunt Milady Sanchez-Martinez. I met Hilda's indolent brother Oscar, and his alcoholic, live-in girlfriend Julia. On one of my twelve trips to the island, I met Cindy Martinez, a new Christian, and her sister Wendy who along with her husband Rafael, was considering starting a church. We exchanged addresses and telephone numbers on the plane, inspired by a sense of destiny that our paths would somehow cross again.

As I was meeting these people and living out this wonderful adventure, God provided me an anointed imagination with which I saw a fully operating mission with a headquarters. He even spoke to my heart that it would be Bill and Lucille Wilson who would direct our operations in the Caribbean.

You can understand my excitement, then, as my wife Randa prepared last September to lead 11 women from our church on a short-term mission to the Dominican Republic. They stayed in our own mission headquarters, were guided through the day-to-day affairs of that spirit-led operation by Bill and Lucille, and met the characters they have heard me speak of time and again from the pulpit here at home. They got to know Hilda Kingsley who now orchestrates many of the behind-the-scenes leadership roles necessary for the mission to interrelate with the people of her village. They met Oscar, a man now born again and transformed into an ambitious and industrious gift to Bill and Lucille in maintaining the mission headquarters, and his wife Julia, now sober for nearly two years, whose marriage I performed on my last trip to their country. Milady Sanchez-Martinez is now the head of a sewing school that was a vision of Lucille Wilson's. Did we mention Lionel, Haitian teacher and interpreter, who became a member of Wendy and Rafael's church? This church, Iglesia El Buen Samaritano, now has expanded to three services on Sunday, held in Parque Central, one of the historic sites in the resort city of Puerta Plata.

I trust you can imagine how my heart swells with joy when I go to greet the people and see the changed lives, both of adults and scores of little children. In the months ahead, we'll be conducting many short term missions, and inviting numbers of you who receive this newsletter to launch out on the great venture with us. I am particularly grateful to many of you who have partnered with us, both in prayer and finances, to bring this miraculous mission to pass.

Victoriously yours,