Has it Been THREE Months?

It's been nearly 3 months since I last posted here. My, how time flies when you're having fun--or when you're just really, REALLY busy.
I thank God for His sustaining power, for His strength, for the health He's blessed us with and most of all for the spiritual health and strength. I thank God for His Living Word. He speaks to my heart and soul on a regular basis through His divine Word of God, the Holy Bible. His Word never changes and it never passes away. Praise God!
Back in "the old days" before Brother Smith had to be in an office 40 hours a week, or out of town much of the time, we used to work on remodeling our house together. We bought a little run down 800 sq. ft. log cabin in the mountains of Colorado and transformed it into a 1,700 sq. ft. log home--building on a new addition and totally remodeling every square inch of the old part. When we got moved to Virginia we dove into remodeling a neglected, but "great bones" house. It turned out beautifully and we enjoyed working on it, and had it almost totally redone in the mere 2 years we lived in it. Then we moved to Cleveland. We've been here 2 1/2 years and we're just finishing up on remodeling our FIRST room. Our remodeling career has suffered a severe blow and isn't likely to recover anytime soon. But, really, this remodeling project is the biggest, baddest one we will encounter with our home here. We completely gutted our master bath, moved walls and repositioned the door from the bedroom into the bathroom and made a humongous mess, but now it's all put back together and is looking beautiful! It's the only room in the house that is really "me." All other projects after this will be a piece of cake. I hope.
One of the big blessings of being here where God has placed us is that we've been able to go places and meet so many people we never would have otherwise. We went to Venezuela a couple of months ago and it was SUCH a blessing! I just LOVE worshipping the Lord with people of other cultures and languages because it's always a reminder that we serve the same God and we love the same Church and the same doctrine! Tomorrow at this time we will be in an airplane somewhere over the Pacific Ocean on our way to the Philippines. Who would have EVER imagined??? How exciting to be able to go visit with our saints there and hopefully be an encouragement to them and minister God's Word to them. It's daunting to think, however, that we will be flying over 18,000 miles on this trip! Unbelievable. Brother Ard and Brother Dupre do it all the time; surely we can survive this trip. They're both much older than we are. ;-)
It's exciting to see all the Lord is doing in and for The Church of God right now. People are "asking their way to Zion" and God is pouring out His blessings in local churches all over the world. Meanwhile, it's exciting as well to see the progress on the HQ Expansion Project. It's looking really beautiful over there,underneath all the sawdust that is. Brother Talley is doing an outstanding job of overseeing the project and we will have a truly first class addition in the near future. It's been a long time coming but I'm so thankful to God that it's made such tremendous progress in just the past 8 weeks or so. You're going to have to come see it!