Mark's Margin:
Summer was so busy for us that we didn’t have time to write a 3rd Quarter Newsletter/Update. LOL, we didn’t get any complaints, so we know nobody missed it. So, we will catch you up now on our happenings! I am afraid that will make this letter a bit long, sorry, and hope you will be patient with us.
We celebrated our first anniversary and now we are joking that we are old married folks! We have loved the adventure of our first year and thank God for a Hallmark wedding, Honeymoon, and now a first year of marriage. We are so blessed!
Connie worked diligently to record and edit the reading of “HE IS!” with the goal of uploading it to be published as an audiobook by the end of 2024. She completed all the audio files by the end of September, and I was able to upload them at the beginning of October. Would her audio files be accepted? Yes, the files were checked and approved and the audio version of “HE IS!” was first published on Amazon/Audible on October 24, 2024. The day after our Dillon, MT wedding anniversary! Then we set the publication date for other distributors for November 1st, 2024.
We invite you to celebrate with us, share the links to let others know about it, and to consider purchasing the audio version at reduced rate until the end of the year at the audio platform of your choice:
I’ll be bold now to ask a favor of you. We are making a push in November and December to let others know that the devotional theology book, HE IS! Knowing God through Fifty Scriptural Meditations would be an inspiring read or listen in 2025 for yourself or another as a gift. What’s the favor? Well, if this book has blessed and encouraged you in your walk with God, please let others know about it on social media, in conversations by suggesting its use in a church small group, and especially by taking the time to write a review on one of the book’s selling sites where it is offered.
Presently “HE IS!” has 20 reviews on Amazon; honestly that is not enough to get Amazon’s algorithms excited about this book. I have been told that it takes 50 before Amazon will start to push a book for sales. Why do I want sales, you may ask? The little income does help us to keep getting word out about our books, but most of all it's to encourage others in their spiritual journey of faith and growth in Christ. I believe that the over 800 verses of Scripture shared in this devotional when meditated on and applied in our lives can help us all to not only grow in our knowledge of God but to know Him more personally and intimately. May our cry be like the Apostle Paul, “That I may know Him!”
For those who don’t have the funds, desire, or account with an audiobook platform, we also hatched a plan to offer the audio version of “HE IS!” as a free podcast on our YouTube Channel. Every Friday a new chapter will be aired and we invite you to share the link, follow along yourself, and let others know about this free resource. Also, your comments will help grow an engaged audience bringing more awareness to a devotional book that is changing lives for good in this world by the Scriptural truth being taught and quoted in each chapter. Please check out the YouTube Podcast of “HE IS!” at the following link: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLII9kjlxSIjkxiLoraBfRGpp7aPWlnkgc&si=Li3OwZ86Xh_6UT-m
We also invite you to pray that God will get this devotional theology book into the hands and ears of those who can benefit and be helped by it for the Glory and praise of God! Thanks!
Connie's Corner
As we reported last newsletter, we've bought a plot of land in my hometown in Canada and are working toward moving there in 2025 and building a small house on the land. We've seen God's amazing provision and guidance in every step of the way along this path. In order to make the move and do the build, we started thinking about getting a travel trailer to live in while building and a truck to pull it. After scouring Facebook Marketplace obsessively for months (mostly just for fun), we knew when the truck turned up and the money was in place to buy it. The timing was right, the price was right, the truck was right. The same thing happened months later with the right travel trailer and just in time for me to do some painting and decorating and making it homey in the month of October before the weather turned cold.
We'll need to sell our present house in Montana before we'd be able to move and start building. We have lots of ideas of how we'd like to fix the house up for sale, and we've seen God's timing and provision in every step of the house renovations, as well. The most recent example was the purchase of the exact vinyl flooring we'd decided on for the kitchen/dining room and bathrooms. We'd talked for months about ordering the flooring we wanted into the nearest Home Depot (in Bozeman, MT). We unexpectedly needed to make a trip to Bozeman to help out a friend needing to make a medical trip. We agreed to do the trip the day before, so we thought it would be very unlikely that the Bozeman Home Depot would have the flooring we were hoping to buy. But when Mark checked online the night before our trip to Bozeman, the site told us there were twenty-four cases in stock. We did some measuring and realized we needed twenty-three cases. We bought twenty-four, presuming God knows something we don't.
We have story after story this year of God's intervention in providing just what we think we need (and even what we think we want) in this move and orchestrating the timing. Mark's immigration process has had the same mark of God's fingerprints all over it with a trip up to Canada (for him. I can't cross the border while waiting on my green card process) that we were planning for Mark to go and check out the lot we bought from a distance. I planned to camp across the border in the US so my family could come and visit me from seven miles away on the Canadian side which is where my hometown is. We knew the timing for that trip was right when Mark was informed by Canadian Immigration that he had thirty days to get a medical exam, and the closest doctor who was certified happened to be in Canada an hour away from my hometown. We have many more stories we could tell of seeing God's hand at work in this process of this move we're planning than we have space to tell them in. So, let me wrap up by saying, it's been so comforting to know that God is sovereign in all the details, and He is leading.