From: Esteban Cobb [mailto:inste@intelnet.net.gt]
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 8:15 PM
To: cstephenc@yahoo.com
Subject: Our blog and journal

Dear friends and family of Steve and Helen:
 
The Lord has recently blessed us with a friend who is helping us set up a blog in order to stay in closer contact with our friends and family. The blog will be linked to our INSTE Guatemala web site, something like www.instegt.org/blog2 .when it is finished (hopefully within a couple of weeks).
 
We’ve been having real trouble getting our emails out lately. It seems our local ISP through the Guatemalan telephone service has been used for so much spam that many email services bounce back information coming from here. Sometimes they get through and sometimes they don’t. This can be very frustrating when wanting to stay in touch.
 
I’ve been keeping a daily personal journal for years as I read through the Bible each year, three chapters, a Psalm and a Proverb each day. I enjoy the Bible so much and it really feeds my faith. Since our youngest son Tim will be joining our troops in Iraq this year, I started sending it to him and our other children. Helen and I were thinking you might enjoy receiving it too.
 
We know that many of you have your own means of maintaining your own relationship with the Lord, and we don’t want to fill your email with junk, so if you don’t want to receive our journal then please just write us a note with the word “unsubscribe” in the subject line and we’ll take you off our list. We’d love for you to post any comments you might have on our blog when it gets set up.
 
C.S. Lewis once said that he had looked to George MacDonald as a mentor. Though he never knew MacDonald personally, through his writings, Lewis’ life was molded by MacDonald’s love for God and people. I have come to feel simarly about the writings of E. Stanley Jones. He was one of the 20th Centuries greatest missionaries. Having died in 1971, at the age of 86, he ministered for 60 years in India and the orient, was a personal friend of Ghandi’s and the Emporer of Japan, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1941. I have found his book “In Christ” to be most inspiring, and I love his anectdotes reflecting on oriental culture. Jones wrote over 30 books, mostly daily meditations. In this one he reflects on each of the 172 passages in the New Testament that mention the concept of “in Christ”. He has one of the purest hearts I’ve ever come accross. Helen and I are in week 34 of our daily reading of this wonderful devotional, and we’ll probably read through it again next year beginning in January, along with our Bible reading.
 
You might find the whole journal too much for you to read each day. You may just like the brief reflection of what I did the day before or Jones’ meditation. Either way, our desire is to build our friendship by edifying you with what has edified us.
 
To keep your address confidential, we are sending this the Bcc button (Blind Carbon Copy).
 
We’d love to get some feed-back from you. Your friendship is a treasure to us.
 
Love,  Steve and Helen