Thank you for your prayers for this trip to the Middle East.

It is great spending time with our teams.

The wars are taking their toll on everyone. For those involved in compassion ministries, it is not only emotionally and physically draining. There is also tremendous spiritual warfare in the Middle East that we face.
Our teams need encouragement, prayers, fellowship and friendship.

Working alongside first-responders, helping people recover from trauma, caring for persecuted Syrian Christians and other religious minorities, and providing food and shelter for refugees, they demonstrate God’s love and share His Gospel with many, at great personal sacrifice.

My time in Lebanon has been busy, interesting, and fruitful.

I had the opportunity to speak at a Filipino church, where about 50 women were crammed into a small room, singing and praising the Lord.

I met with a Syrian Alawite who was targeted by Islamist government forces in a town where hundreds of Alawites and Christians have been and continue to be slaughtered. After several encounters with these murderers broke into his house, stole everything his mother, sister, and he owned, and many threats of violence, they pointed a rifle at him and told him they were going to kill him that night. So he fled to Lebanon, where he didn’t know anyone. And the Lord led him to Saeed (the son of our friend and partner Pastor Joseph)...a divine encounter.

The next day, I met with a Syrian Christian family of seven who fled the Islamist government forces, who were destroying their property and threatening their lives because they are Christian. They had a good life in Syria. They had a home, cars, and other property. They ran a phone shop and grew fruit and crops to sell in the market. Then the current regime took power. From that time, the Christian and Alawite communities have been harassed, assaulted, kidnapped, and murdered. Their shop and home had been shot at many times. The final event that convinced them to leave was when a van of six armed men pulled up to their store and attempted to kidnap the father, but he was able to fight them off. That night, they fled to Lebanon, and the Lord led them to Pastor Joseph (our partner)...another of many divine encounters.

Although there is a ceasefire, Israel continues to surveil Hezbollah with drones and to strike targets in Lebanon.

There is a specific neighborhood of Beirut where Hezbollah controls and continues to run operations against Israel. There, their leaders secretly meet. Israel has surveillance drones overhead looking for them day and night, and when they find one, they immediately send in an airstrike.

We drove through this neighborhood to see the damage, which was tremendous. We returned to the office, which is about a 1/2 mile away from this neighborhood as the crow flies, we got a news update that Israel had carried out a strike on a senior Hezbollah leader and destroyed a building we were next to.

This is daily life for our teams, who face personal and family risks and continue to “run towards the fray,” helping the suffering refugee, preparing communities for disaster, or discipling new believers. They serve the Lord by serving the Least & the Last day by day.

They need your help.

We invite you to join our teams in the Middle East by donating using the link below.