Dear Friends,

Well I have a new heart now, or practically new, after a six by-pass operation. This matter came up rather suddenly and we hadn’t made any announcements about it. It seemed that I developed some chest pain just before Thanksgiving and one of our ardent supporters who is a cardiologist insisted that I go to the hospital, for a check-up. Once they got me there I turned out to be “the turkey.” They told me there was no time to lose and on Friday moaning after Thanksgiving (when they had finished their holiday) they did a real circumcision of my heart.

So now the pain is gone and I know the truth of the verse that says “the life of the flesh is in the blood.” I now have a fresh blood supply to the most desperately wicked places of my heart and I feel remarkably better already. The surgery was a total success and although the recovery is rather slow and grim at times, I look forward to many years of renewed energy ahead. The only worry the surgeon really had was about my beard possibly dropping into my chest incision on the operating table but they taped it up so high on my face they said it covered my nose. I’m sorry we didn’t get a picture of that for you.

So, without beleaguering the point I’d like to offer the counsel that if any of you are putting off this operation, it was much easier than I would have imagined, and quite a safe and rejuvenating procedure. As I understand it now, my chest pains will be gone virtually forever. I’ll be at full Speed again, and considering what I personalty think about the timing of the Rapture of the Church, these by-passes will take me all the way home!

On to our graver, problems–moving the office–the Lord came through in the last week as He so often does and we are established in comfortable new quarters. It was one of those close scrapes with many supporters and prayer partners helping on every front. But the battle was being taken care of by the Lord behind the scenes all the while. I won’t bore you with the details; it all sounds like any of those typical stories of how we slowly win this war. I do want to thank you for the equipment for our new offices—the copy machine and especially the microwave oven which were provided by viewers. When gifts like those come out of the family of our supporters I regard them as coming from everyone and I just want to express my gratitude that you took the time to think and pray about it. When I think about it, I don’t suppose there’s anything we have ever asked for from the very beginning that was not immediately provided, so that we could go ahead and get on with the job. Frankly, I think it’s one of the secrets of how we run our particular ministry that we don’t spend your money on frills but exactly according to our pledge to you (and to the law of the land). We spend all donations on television and its directly related expenses, and when it comes to needing a chair, table or even a car we just ask for it. If God wants us to have it we get it. And we still have your donations to make the programs. That all sounds like common sense, but so many businesses and even some ministries evidently don’t subscribe to it and I think that’s where they have a problem.

The new office location makes me think back to those of our past years. Our set-up has never been very fancy. I started on just a desk with a typewriter, of course, in the classical tradition of struggling young writers, and progressed finally to a shed in the back yard and then at last to my first office building. There I had one office provided by an insurance company run by Christians. I felt very important because my little office had twelve desks in it. It actually was a storage room for desks and if you didn’t mind crawling across them on your hands and knees to get to mine you could confer with me in the corner by the windows. Working in that office we were already producing television programs and tours to Israel but of course we had very few visitors. Then the Equitable Life Assurance Company offered to swap our ministry two rooms for Bible teaching. We would be allowed to occupy a small unused suite of theirs and every Thursday at lunch time I would meet in the building auditorium with those that wanted to look into the Word. It was a fancy building in downtown Dallas called One Main Place, and the significance of that period was the nature of folks who gave up their Thursday lunches to see what God thought about their lives and about their futures. They were mainly lawyers and bankers and high-powered business types and they were completely sincere about knowing the Word. I won’t say that every executive in the building came downstairs on Thursdays but the ones we’ll see in the Kingdom did.

Then the American Board of Missions to the Jews took us into their fine old home in North Dalias and we stayed there a few years in friendly fellowship and under very moderate terms. Eventually they had to sell their building since it wasn’t making sense to keep up that large and old fashioned property and they were streamlining their budget. And so we are at last on our own. This is the first time, when I think about it, that we’re out from somebody else’s nest and simply making our way in the open market. The landlord is a viewer of the program and the place is very pleasant and adequate for our needs. (Well actually we could use a long conference table and chairs at this point if anybody has access to those. I gather they’re quite expensive but ours can be very plain, old or whatever. It’s just that we now have meetings with any number of people and not a whole lot of places to have them be seated. If you’re in furniture or you just happen to have something of that kind, do let us know and we will arrange shipping or pick-up as you like. The deduction is just the same as a cash gift to the ministry of course. I can promise you that this table will do a significant work in our common labors).

It may be significant to some of you that in this long period where we’ve made do on scratchy surroundings and second-hand equipment our ministry has prospered more than 100-fold. I mean that literally: if this were a private enterprise and you had bought one share of stock in the first week of the television program, that stock would now sell for 100 times its price! And this was accomplished in a period when a vast majority of small businesses actually failed and most of the rest were glad to just stay even. On top of that we have expanded marvelously, now covering every nook and cranny of the United States, Alaska and Hawaii, and even some foreign zones, and we have kept our records right. An IRS audit that occured this year passed without incident and if anything we bewildered the tax collectors by how very meticulously we do things. They don’t appreciate that our standards are not for the inspection of the Secretary of the Treasury, but for the King of Kings.

So I can finally boast a little while looking back over all of our time together. I can report to you very candidly that “we have run a good race.”

I say all this at a time when I know that you have given your all. The year-end gifts were very nice this time. They’re not all in yet and we haven’t got all the bills from our Promised Land series so it’s hard to tell just where we’ll splash down. But I know how helpful you’ve been and I want to encourage you at this point that your gifts, so earnestly and sincerely given, are in good hands. By about a month from now I’ll be able to give our typical winter report where we come sailing out of the holocaust of the past fall’s production bills and see if there will indeed be first fruits in the Spring. Thanks and thanks again for helping.

Upcoming for the Spring and Summer are more new programs (funding permitting) and a Holy Land combination Middle-Eastern land-and-sea tour. If it all works out we have a truly fabulous itinerary in mind which would take in Egypt and the pyramids, Israel in full and then a cruise on the Mediterranean for the important 1st-century Church sites such as Ephesus, Patmos, Corinth, Athens, etc. We have been announcing this right along but it’s difficult to get it all bolted down; I just wanted to inform you that we’re still working at it and our plan is to make it available for June. If you possibly can go along–This is the trip!

Beyond that please be in prayer for us as we go into an uncertain year. Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex and 39-cable people please know that your programming has become much more expensive for us now. Channel 39 blasted us with a sudden and very considerable air time raise. And so far no network has written in to say that they are lowering their price. But know on the plus side your host is hale and hearty. We are at our jobs taking your message through and we are most delighted to be serving you, believe me. Thank you for all those kind responses on the “Promised Land” series. We’ll rerun it as soon as the last folks down the cable have seen all the programs. And by that time many of you will undoubtedly be seeing new programming.

Thanks again personally for all your help. I know how many of you were praying for me last month because I could literally feel it!

Your messenger,

Isaiah 62:1