February 1994 Personal Letter

Dear Friends,

I had a most unusual Christmas this year. Ordinarily, I don’t really celebrate the holiday in the traditional way since I wasn’t brought up with it. My family kept the Jewish festivals, of course, and until I came to the Lord at age 32, I really never gave Christmas much thought. When people asked me what my family did for Christmas as I grew up, I would joke about our 5 and 10 cent store; I would say, “When we counted up the register on December 24, we would sing one stanza of What a Friend we Have in Jesus.”

But this year I went to a wonderful party at a place where you could look out the window at Bethlehem! Although we were on a high hill in southern Jerusalem, we had all the trimmings — a tree with twinkling lights supplied by Palestinian Christian friends, a piano, carol singing and a preacher — and all this at an Israeli kibbutz. It was probably the best Christmas party I have ever attended and the rest of our Christmas tour group thought so too.

The Christmas tour also visited settlers in the famous West Bank in order to get the true story of what’s happening with the new peace agreement. Needless to say, one gets quite a different perspective hearing the news from Israelis in Israel than from the American media.

For Christmas gifts, our ministry gave copies of a book stressing the importance of the West Bank to Israel’s security and particularly the fact that God specifically gave those territories to the Jews. We intend to continue these West Bank visits on our upcoming tours and you are certainly invited. Call Karen at 214-690-1876 during business hours, or 1-800-WONDERS anytime for your brochure of our Spring tour, March 6–15/20, 1994.

I want to tell you that year-end giving was really very good and I deeply appreciate your taking us seriously. Through the winter months, I stressed in these letters and on our television programs that we were very challenged by the sudden developments between Israel and the PLO. Although we had prepared a very complete and expensive television series, Tell It on the Mountains, I felt that we had to interrupt it and cover the prophetic situation that was developing. Frankly, I don’t know how else you would obtain a truthful report. I have sincerely never seen the secular media so grossly misunderstand and misreport a crucially important political situation. And the other Christian programs are not very adept at covering modern Israel, although they typically show a good spirit toward the Promised Land. We don’t have the budget of the big national ministries, nor the personnel of CNN, nor the vast outreach of major news magazines, but we know the territory and we know the truth.

And so I made the sincerest appeals for extra funds to cover the extra programming which we called Signs of the End, and you came through. The budget is here to finish out the programs and both series will have run in full by the time you get this letter. (Signs of the End is actually an ongoing series since prophetic signs will continue to appear until the day of the Lord, so these programs will be continued in the future, if He tarries.)

So thank you again and please know that we’re in pretty good shape for now. I have always told you that we would tell you when we needed your help and when we didn’t. This might be a time that you consider giving to sister ministries who might have more needs than we do at the moment.

I must personally also thank you for your prayers about my heart trouble. It has abated and I am pretty much back to a normal schedule. I performed a stress test a few weeks ago with the same results as I had at age 38! I declared to my doctor and his wife, “I have a 38-year-old body!” The Mrs. nodded soberly and said, “Yes, but where do you have it?”

Thanks again and God bless you.

Your messenger,