Twenty-Nine Months—and Counting Our Blessings

Last weekend we made a very quick trip to Chicago for a Keep Believing board meeting. It turned out to be a most encouraging time as we considered what God has done starting with the beginning of the ministry in May 2008. Since then we have achieved tax-exempt status with the IRS, adopted a logo and a key statement ("Our Name Is Our Mission"), started the Book Depot in Chicago, given away over 20,000 copies of An Anchor for the Soul, ordered two new printings of the Chinese version of An Anchor for the Soul, completely revamped our website, started a weekly podcast, seen the sermon email list grow from 2500 to over 4800, and in the last six months we have had 138,000 visits from 192 countries to the KBM website. We now have over 825 sermons, over 300 articles, and five years of blog entries on the website. And all of it is free all the time. We see clearly that God has called us to encourage pastors and other Christian workers and to provide high-quality biblical resources for the body of Christ worldwide.

Here’s a note we received from South Africa:

I thank God for people like you in this world, putting msgs not knowing who might need it, but God knew that will need this msg this morning. i slept few hours last night because my husband didn’t come home, i was so worried maybe something happened to him, but when I woke up i realized some of his clothes are gone and his toiletry, I was so angry and felt like giving up, but in my spirit these words came up, “mountain moving prayer,” then i know in my spirit, I’m not suppose to quit, i type this text and then your website came up, it turned around my day. “If God is God,” then he will do what he’s capable of doing, what he has done for us, he will bring salvation to my husband’s life, i must just persevere in prayer. Thank you for allowing God to use you, and may he bless you, open doors for you, and fulfill your heart.

She found us in the middle of the night by typing “mountain moving prayer” in a search engine. Every single day, we have hundreds of people who find us for the first time by going to Google or their favorite search engine and then typing in phrases like “overcoming bitterness", “how should an affair be handled by the church", “why did this happen to me” and all kinds of topics that remind us that people are looking for answers to very difficult challenges. We ran a search on the term “suicide” and found that 46 people have reached us using that term.

Besides our travel in the United States, last year we were in Thailand and Canada, and this year we have ministered in Bolivia, China and the Czech Republic, and we will be back in Canada next month. In the years to come we want to provide our material in many different languages. We are already working on the “Keep Believing China” project to provide Chinese-language translations of the sermons.

So we want to say Thank You to our many friends in the US and around the world. This is entirely a venture of faith. A friend asked me how much of this I thought might come to pass when we started Keep Believing. The answer is, we wanted to start the Book Depot. The rest has come little by little as the Lord has opened new doors.