July 2024 Prayer Needs Brad and Hannah Smith

Sawyer has pneumonia, prayers for health.

I’ll be gone in Europe for a chunk of August. Trying to line up a few more trainings there with some new connections. Prayer for safety for the fam while I’m gone and all the right connections there. 

Hope you are well! As always we are so thankful for you! I wanted to quickly forward on these stories (praises!) from a very short training I lead back in October last year. I've copied the relevant part of the email:

We're loving our DBS group!  We have a potluck dinner at our home every week,  and it's started to feel like family.  Our whole group looks forward to it.  Everyone has really opened up in our discussions, and it's made the Bible very approachable for a group that came in with some serious baggage regarding God's Word. We do struggle a little with getting everyone to "take action" on the verse... there's always at least 1 person who declines. But it's someone different every week,  and I guess we all have those moments where we don't want to move. Overall,  we've seen hearts softening and minds opening to God's word. 

Here's a few fun stories for you: 

When we read Genesis 3 with the group,  one of the women admitted that she always hated that passage because God's judgement is too harsh and mean, but after our discussion,  she realized how loving and fair he is! A complete 180!

One of the men told us that, as recently as October,  he  would have said "this is all BS". And 3 weeks ago, he admitted that he fully believes God is real, and Jesus and the crucifixion really happened. He's still working on what his relationship with God looks like, but every week since then he's testified to the rest of the group that God is REAL and they need to figure it out!

One of the women has been bringing her teen daughter to hang with our 13 and 10 year old kids during the group (they run off to play after dinner). The mom just got the courage to share the gospel with her daughter 2 weeks ago! Turns out her daughter was open to talking about it and had a bunch of questions about God. Her mom convinced her to go to church camp with my daughter this week, so we are praying for her to come to knowledge of Christ! 

These keep me going. I had no idea until a few days ago anything came of that training. 

Please pray for us in the immediate. Sawyer has pneumonia, which is not improving as fast with amoxicillin as it should, and Hudson and Hannah seem to have contracted whatever caused it in Sawyer in the first place. Not that we're going anywhere, it's too hot to do anything outside anyways