To our dear friends and supporters,

“And it came to pass”! The toughest part is over and we can’t thank the Lord enough for each of you that have stuck it through with us through thick and thin! May God bless each of you, for your faithfulness, your love, your support and partnership! Thank you, thank you, thank you so very much for the blessing and encouragement you are to each of us!

About two months after coming home on this only our second furlough, we thought we understood why God took us out of Honduras and brought us home on furlough! We couldn’t have been more wrong! As more and more weeks kept coming at us, and we traveled more and more to report to our churches; it’s when we realized we could not let 1999 repeat it self again. If you remember back then, we reported to most of our churches, I had a mini-stroke, had both legs operated on, and Mrs. Laparra had a baby! Hew! And we kind of just swallowed culture shock and made believe it didn’t exist!

We weren’t about to make the same mistake twice! There’s an old Latin proverb that goes like this: “Any man may make a mistake; none but a fool will persist in it.” And folks, I didn’t want to be a fool before God, before my wife and children, and before you! So we finished up our first four months of reporting and traveling; that’s when the Lord closed the doors for housing in NY and opened them up in NC. Well, did you know God knows best? When we first came home in 1999, our oldest was seventeen! Now we come home almost ten years later and we have two married and one of those two just made us Grandparents! Two more are also out, but single, two more that we came to leave behind, 4 teenagers at home plus 2 more ten and under! Hew again! And on top of that we returned during some of the worst and most unstable times since the great depression! We very quickly discovered culture shock in ’99 and in 08 is two totally different things!

 To say it’s been a challenge is an understatement! If you think that’s a complaint? NOT! It has been the most wonderful experience to once again see that our Great God is not limited by any man’s economy! By who wins or looses the elections! Or for that matter by how greedy, wicked, ignorant, mean, angry, hateful, arrogant, and of little faith man can be! Thank you Lord for your unconditional love for us!!

I say all of that to say that upon this return home, at first we were very apprehensive and a little worried because of the State of the Nation! But it has turned out to be such a blessing and an eye opener! The Lord has opened tremendous doors for us to minister while we’re back! We have found God’s people very hungry for the Word of God! We are also seeing the platform being set up for God’s people to have a chance of returning to the authority, need and simplicity of God’s Word!

We have also been working hard to set ourselves to be able to minister to the 800,000+ Latinos in North Carolina with whatever time we have in between meetings! The door is wide open but many fear because many are illegal & suspicious whether we could turn them in or whether the law is watching us! This creates a problem in trying to get them to come out! So we’re trying to find out how we can go to them instead of them coming to us! Please be a prayer over this because I think it’s an irony that we work harder to reach them here then on the field because they hide here but not there! Pray for us to have much wisdom!

Please be in prayer as by the time you get this letter I’ll be back in Honduras on a mission to scout the land and see what doors God may or may not have opened, or for that matter what doors He may or may not have closed for the Laparra Family Team! I’ll be there short of two weeks! Pray for God’s continued protection over our health as we’re always around lots of people!

I’ll close by thanking all of the churches we’ve been in! Thank you for your incredible love, understanding and support for us being home under the conditions that we’re home! We love you very much and thank you for standing with us as we seek God’s face, as we serve him here and there; and for the notes, gifts, packages, letters and cards y’all have sent to the team!

The Laparras