Raymer Update - July 2008

July 2008
Dear Praying Friends,

Psalm 89:11 The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine: as for the world and the fulness thereof, thou hast founded them.

We praise the Lord for His goodness and provision for our family. These past few months have been even busier than our normal schedule. The month of May started with a special celebration dinner marking 50 years in the ministry for Debbie’s dad Valente Hernandez. We are thankful for the faithfulness that Bro. Hernandez has shown to our Lord for these years. We were also thankful that Debbie’s sister Karen along with her 5 month old daughter Liana were able to come from Hawaii for the special celebration. We enjoyed spending time with the family.

The first week of May took our family back to Monterrey to continue working on our new program to provide continuing education to pastors. Russell recorded a two week module course taught by Missionary Jim Gardner on Youth and Camp Ministries. The course was well received by the students and area pastors. During the same period of time, we hosted our second Intensive Course for pastors. This was the same course material that was taught last October in Saltillo, but this time we were able to share it with pastors in the Monterrey area. We were excited to have 20 pastors in attendance at this conference, and we are looking forward to more of these conferences in the future, with the next one in Cd. Madero in September.

We were also able to be in Monterrey for the graduation services of the Universidad Cristiana de Las Américas. Over the past several years we have been able to get to know several of the graduates on a personal level, most notably was our close friend Idai Ramirez whom we have known for 16 years. Idai graduated with a degree in Linguistics. She has helped our family with the groups traveling into Mexico with us for the past three summers, and it was a special blessing for us to see her walk across the platform and receive her degree!

In June we were busily working on preparing for the mission teams and packing up our house to get ready for our upcoming move to Monterrey. It has been great seeing how God has brought everything together for our move. We should be closing on the sale our house in McAllen and close on the purchase of our new home in Monterrey within a week. We are excited about our future ministry with OREMUNDO and the university in Monterrey.

July has been busy with mission teams. Our first group traveled to work at the Christian university in Monterrey to assist in different projects around the campus. Our main project was to paint the interior of both dormitories.

Our next trip was with our home church, Tri-City Baptist from Kansas City. We were able to take the group to the north side of Guadalupe where we were able to assist in two vacation Bible schools each day. The first was at the church where we were staying. We had a little over 200 in attendance at this VBS. The second was at a new church that is being started by the main church. We had 100 attending this VBS located in the pastor’s house.

Carena continues to grow and make new friends everywhere she is. She is excited about the move to Monterrey (as long as we bring her toys ). She is looking forward to attending K4 this coming year.

Thanks for your prayers and support,
Russell, Debbie & Carena Raymer

Prayer Requests:
• Last mission team
• Finalizing sales and purchases of houses
• Ministry changes
• Carena as she starts school
• Furniture and household importation to be smooth

Hurricane Dolly

Today Hurricane Dolly has decided to come for a visit. Thankfully she went a little north, but we are now getting the wind and the rain that comes with a Cat. 2 hurricane. I went out and took a short video so you could see some of the rain here at my folk's place in Mission, Texas. The interesting thing is that the wind is coming in from the West and the hurricane is coming in from the East. This is due to the counter-clock-wise movement of the hurricane.
The wind and rain have picked up a little more since this video was taken at 5:23 PM central time.
One of the funniest things that I saw was a small animal running across the back alley and I was trying to figure out what it was as it was running like a dog, but looked funny. I then saw it was a jack-rabbit that was just scarred and trying to figure out how to get out of the rain.

House in Monterrey

We praise the Lord that the sale of our home in McAllen continues to move forward. We should close on both the house in McAllen and the new home in Monterrey this week. Here are a few photos of the new house.