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Mongolia (Feb 2001)
Happy Fairly-New/Slightly-Used Year! It is mid-January as we write this Stanley update, but the days seem to have speeded up as we entered the new year so we are putting February on the top and hoping that this letter actually gets to you before February is all gone.

John and Ruth The end of the year 2000 was an exciting time for us. We wrote in our last letter in August that we were going to be home for a while and hoped to be able to "catch up". Evidently the Lord had more important things for us to "catch up on" in the world and He immediately planned a surprise trip to Outer Mongolia. It took weeks of planning, buying equipment and praying for a radio license, but we spent three weeks in the capitol city Ulaan Baatar in October and November setting up a new FM radio station for some Mongolian Christians and thank God for the experience. We have lots of pictures and will work with God and His timetable so that we can work out an opportunity to show them to you.

Shortly after returning from Mongolia, another surprise trip appeared and we found ourselves back in Ecuador for the first two weeks in December. It is always good to be back home in Ecuador and the special digital tests that we went down to help with at Radio HCJB went well.

And so here we are in January and yes, we are in Georgia as we write this. The weather during the holidays and even into January has been very un-Georgia-like as we had three snows before Christmas and very, very cold weather. Our driveway, long and steep, has been very slick several times and we have walked up and down it a lot as our van is very timid and refuses to go where it cannot feel gravel undertire! Our water storage tank, which gravity feeds from a hill, froze completely into a solid block of ice which lasted for several weeks and our woodpile is rapidly disappearing. However, we are GLAD for the opportunity to be home! Really! And we have built an antenna for Kenya as well as managed some "catch up" tasks on computer and house. We have also been leading mid-week services and handling some visiting responsibilities at our Georgia church as our pastor is taking military chaplaincy training and gone weekdays for 11 weeks.

We hesitate to lay out our 2001 schedule as God reads this letter too, but even as we lay it out, we pray James 4:15 over it. It looks like there is a radio station board meeting in Panama in February and we plan to go to Australia in March staying until mid-April helping at a station in Darwin that has been recently purchased by Christian Vision...the mission that we have helped before in Zambia and in Chile.

On the way home from Australia, we hope to stop in Las Vegas to attend three radio conventions. John is presenting a paper at one of them about the history of Christian broadcasting in Latin America, a topic that has been easy to write about! He is using as examples many of the stations we have worked at.

Later in the summer we hope to take some church work groups to New Mexico and Alaska....a task which is always very challenging to put together, but so life changing and life blessing to those who participate...even us, or maybe, especially us!

As more and more of you get computers and Internet and e-mail access, here is a question for you. Are there some of you that would prefer to receive our letter via the Internet? We have a web page (members.aol.com/jnrstanley) and we could notify you when the new letter has been posted. Then, you would go to the web page and read it there. If that is your desire, please drop us a note via e-mail to say so and we will copy down your e-mail address and handle it that way in the future. Notice that the letter would be posted on our web page so this means you must have Internet access and not just e-mail that might not also include full Internet capabilities.

We also usually write a monthly article that is for our local church in Georgia and it appears on their web page (nsumc.org) so you can read that as well. Since we also send this monthly article to our supporting churches, you may already be reading it. Not all of you are members of a supporting church, however, so this notice is for those of you who aren't.

However, we will continue to send out a paper letter for those of you who do not have access to the Internet or to those of you who just prefer to have a paper letter. It doesn't matter to us as long as you continue to read, pray and give! And we thank you!!

ger When we were visiting in the home of a Mongolian woman, she asked us a pointed question, "Why are you old people still working?" It turns out she was older than we are....by 5 or 6 years....and felt that she was very, very old as most Mongolians are long since dead by that age as the life is hard there and the weather severe.

Sometimes we wonder the same thing!! But God, the timeless One, continues to plan our days and travels and He always plans for our good, so we'll leave it with Him. And we leave you, our faithful friends, with Him as well.

Australia | Mexico, Panama, Alaska


This website was last update was on the 13th of May 2002.