Update for December

Well all for keeping up on this daily.
A lot has happened in the last month.... Many of you know by now, but our beloved Pastor Billy Joe passed away November 22nd at 4:40am. He died from an infection caused by treatment of his Lymphoma. Sad ordeal BUT.... God has already started a great work in the church here. I can tell great things are going to happen.

Last night was our All Staff Christmas Part. It was fun, we laughed, but it was so weird not having Pastor there. Sharon has stepped in as the New Senior Pastor over Victory Christian Center. I think she will do a fabulous job. She has been such an encouragement to all of us.

It's still hard to wrap my mind around it. It seems like he's just on a long trip and he's due back any day.

Another great leader went Home to Jesus to day. Oral Roberts.... 91 years young. I'm glad to hear that he finally gets to go see Jesus, but sad to hear he passed on so suddenly after Pastor Billy Joe.

Having said all of that I feel such an urgency like I have never felt before. The top leaders are being thinned out to make room for new ones, and also to thin out those that were worshiping them. Sounds harsh but that's the way I see it.

I am super excited to see what God has for the body of Christ to do next.



I'm not sure when my next post will be because Christmas is coming and I've got lots of preparations yet to do. Plus we leave for Mexico soon. I am super excited about that. I love going to Mexico. Plus I get to go to Mexico with my husband and a bunch of really awesome people. God is going to do so many amazing things in all of our lives I can't wait to get back and tell you all about it.

Thank You for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoy it.




School is good. We had finals last week, and this quarter, I feel went really well. This week we get to do a whole week of outreaches. Monday we worked on our dramas we will be doing when we go to Mexico today we worked down at the Back Loading Doc for the Food Pantry. Tomorrow and Thursday we get to wrap Christmas Presents for Bus Ministry children and Friday is just fun. I'm excited!

Update #2

Yay! Time to sit down and write!
It has been such a crazy week. Classes have been good. This past weekend was our dream center outreach. It went well.
The Dream Center is a ministry out of Victory Christian Center. We had (as a class) spent the last week planning for our outreach. Every Friday the Dream Center has a service. Our class went out and did the service. We did a drama we had practiced, some one preached, and at the end we had some give a ways. After the service everyone was served a warm meal. After the service I got to work in the clothing room. While a mother went in I held her baby for her. He was really cute. I hope to get pictures up soon. There was team that was in charge of taking pictures so I don't have any in my possession yet. Anyway that was last week Friday. Saturday we went to a friends house to a party. The latest Call of Duty came out and Chris went to play. I went because the friend's house we went to, they recently had a baby. I went to see the baby :-). He was a cutie! Sunday was a lay low day, and then our school/work week started again.

Classes are still good. Spanish is stretching for me. We are taking Spanish all school year, and WOW I think they are cramming all of High School Spanish into one school year. I feel like I am learning so much it's insane. I like it, but I have to keep on top of it or I get really lost.

Well I probably should go for now. I just wanted to write a quick update. I had some time to sit down and wiggle my fingers a little to get something up here. I hope you are enjoying these posts.
Blessings!

Sidewalk trucks

This post is here to expain how our sidewalk truck site works.

I use the term "sidewalk truck" for a few reasons. 1. that is what they are refured to by Victory. 2. we usually park in the street (along the sidewalk) and that's where we set up. In a nut shell it is a side walk sunday school lesson. We target children, but parents are welcome to come too.

A sidewalk truck are old UPS or FedEx style trucks that have either been baught or given to victory. Each truck generally has the same design as far as, two speakers, sound board, converter, and a big box to put groceries in. Something that amazes me about this ministry is about the only expense is probably gas for the trucks. All the food that we get is donations from local grocery stores. Just like God's Word says, we are blessed to be a blessing. It is our goal each week to come back with an empty truck.

How a service works is pretty fun. We get to our site and it takes us about 15-20 minutes to set up. On our truck we have two tarps (one for girls and one for boys), 9-10 chairs for the parents, and 8 cones to hold down the corners of the tarps. We fold out the side of the truck (which is our stage) and begin setting up our sound equipment (two speakers and one or two microphones).

once we are set up our service goes as follows:

• start by welcoming the children and explaining the rules, and Most important things.
• have a time of praise and worship
• announcements
• game
• lesson
• prayer
• hand out give-aways to children, hand out bags of groceries to adults
• pack up and go home

We do this outreach as part of a class we take at school called Leadership and Local Outreach. We have really been stretched with our site. It is up in Northern Tulsa, in an apartment complex that is predominately black. I am usually very comfortable getting in front of children and sharing, but this has been something completely different for me. It has been fun though to see God move through Chris and I when it comes to ministering to the children and praying for the adults.

Prayer Requests

Please keep us in Prayer on Fridays between 2pm-6pm

We help out before we go out on our truck, with whatever they need help with. We usually don't get back to the parking lot until 6pm because of where our site is, it usually takes us about 30-45 minutes to travel.

Car update

YAY!!!! Praise God!

We are getting a full refund on our car!!! We still having to get it fixed at the mechanic it is at now, but praise God it's going to get fixed, and from what I understand we will get money back in our pocket! God is too good!!! No He is good! There's no such thing as being too good!!!

Anyway that's what I know for now :-)

Picture update

Here we go I'm going to try and post some pictures of our honey moon.

This picture obviously is us at the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Gatlinberg, TN is where we stayed. Beautiful part of the States.

To see the rest of our pictures check out our our mobile me site. Here's the link:

http://gallery.me.com/lofstromcm#100047

I don't want to focus too much on the past. I want to keep you up to date on what is happening now.

Here are some pictures of Our side walk truck

This is Chris Driving the truck.

This was our first day out on our own site. The past few weeks we had gone along with someone to learn how to do our own truck.

We have had lots of fun on our site. Like I've said in earlier posts it has been a stretch though. We usually go out every friday and start our service at 4pm. How a service usually goes is we start out by welcoming the children and going over the rules. Something I love about the ministry we are working with is how easy they make it to run a truck all by your self

update on the car

The car is no longer at Firestone we took it to a real mechanic in Broken Arrow. What all happened I'm still in awe that someone can be so clueless about cars. Chris called the mechanic in BA this morning and from what they said the timing is still off. They have already done $80 worth of labor just checking things, but have found that what Firestone has done is not correct. Be praying that we will have favor with Firestone in getting our money back.

That's what I know for now I will keep this updated on what we know

God is so good.
We had a great weekend. Friday was our 5 month anniversary. It's hard to believe it has already been 5 months. We have already finished our 1st quarter of our school year. So far that has been amazing.
Saturday we had drama practice for an outreach we will be doing on Friday. Sunday was just good, went to Sunday School and church was good. We got a good report on Pastor Billy Joe. We all had been praying and agreeing for his cell count to go up and his bone marrow to start working. Praise God it did. we got the good report sunday.

Today is monday and it's been an eventful day already.

Lofstrom Update #1

Greetings and welcome to the Lofstrom Blog

I hope to keep this as current as Possible. I would like to go back and update, but I will do that as I go throughout my posts. I hope you enjoy our updates.

My point to this blog is to give you details I don't put in our support letters. My plan is to keep our letters short to the point and with lots of pictures. :-) I know how much I love looking at pictures, and Chris is good at takeing pictures.

To get to what has been going on lately.

School

We just started our 2nd quarter of Mission classes they are great. I love what we are learning. It all is so practical and I can't wait to not only use it but pass it on to others.

I'll explain how a school day works. We start at 8am with Worship. Then we go to class when that's done (around 8:20). We have an hour of teaching then have a 10 minute break followed by another hour of teaching. We then have a 20 minute break (long break) in between classes. The second classes starts and it's the same as the first (1 hour teaching 10 minute break 1 hour teaching). Makes for a long morning sometimes, but it's good teaching always.

This quarter's classes include:

Monday - Funding Your Ministry 2 with Greg Ford and Chapel where different missionaries come and speak. Funding Your ministry is teaching us the scriptural side of asking for money, and how it's not wrong to let people know that you need help making our calling happen. It's a really good class and I always leave really excited. :-)

Chapels are fun although I always want to hop in the missionary's suitcase and go home with them back to their country. I am getting lots of ideas of trips to send other people on.

Tuesday - Christian Teaching Fundamentals with Jill Stafford and Issues in Living in Another Culture with Steve and Rita Andrews. I'll talk more about the rest of the classes as they happen

Wednesday - Multi Media with Christie Patrick and Prayer for the Nations with Linda Turner

Thursday - Internship with Reba Altizer and then Spanish (this class Chris and I have two different teachers.) I am in beginner's Spanish and Chris is in Advanced.

Friday - Leadership and Local Outreach with Janka Kozicova

Home

Outside of school we do get to a little besides go to school and to work. We lately have had a test on our faith with our car. While we were down in Little Rock, Arkansas the timing belt on our car had to be fixed. It didn't break or anything, but it had to be fixed in order to get home. Praise God we were not on the road when it started acting funny. While we there we took it to Firestone and it took them all of Monday to fix it. We got on the road around 4pm. After getting back to Tulsa we noticed it still wasn't acting normal. We took it back into Firestone and they had it for over a week. That week was a long week. We took it in Monday and they didn't even look at it till Friday. Friday they broke the timing belt cover so they said they would have it done on monday. Monday came, they ordered a wrong part so we waited till tuesday. Tuesday came they called and asked if our AC worked before we brought it in, we said yes, and they replied saying they would have to fix that also. Wednesday they were said they would have it done by 4:30 Chris called around 5pm and I don't remember what all they said was wrong, but they had to take it out for a test drive to make sure it was working properly. Thursday came around 5pm we finally got our car back. Friday we took it to our mechanic is Broken Arrow.

Ministry

On a lighter note I though I'd share about some of the things we are getting to do here at Victory as far as ministry. As part of our Leadership and Local Outreach class we lead a sidewalk truck. What a sidewalk truck is, is an old UPS truck or FEDEX or something like that. One side of the truck is converted into a fold out stage. Each truck has it's own sound system. We have our site that we go to each week.

It has been a stretching experience for both of us. Our site is in Northern Tulsa (about a mile and 1/2 North of the dividing line of North and South). This part of Tulsa is the poorer part of Tulsa and our site is mostly black people. Not to be racist, but it is. It's heart breaking to see how many hopeless people are there. Praise God we have good news.

The hardest part for me though is relating to them. Little while girl that has been raised in Little white people's church doesn't fit in well in a very black community. We have to make sure that we are prepared not only in our lesson plan, but by being prayed up as well. We more than anything have to do a spiritual war before we can go in. It is so dark there if we are not prayed up it is almost depressing just going in to the community.

I also have quickly caught on the same songs I learned in sunday school are of little or no interest to them. Actions or no actions it doesn't matter to them. I finally gave up and just went ahead and had a time of worship and Chris and I just praised and worshiped. Some entered in, but most didn't.

Even though we have had a hard time with sidewalk trucks here I am looking forward to starting them in Hays.