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November 2, 2007
Dear Praying Friends,
We would like to ask that you continue to pray for us. Things go up and down,
and we have had a few families that are not coming at present. They are having
some spiritual problems in their lives, and if past performance is an
indication, they will probably drop out of church for 6 months or so and then
return. It is sad to see new Christians asking why older Christians do this kind
of thing, but it is immaturity, and you do not measure maturity by years but by
faithfulness and holiness. We do have from 4 to 6 going out every Saturday on
witnessing.
Please pray for Tule especially in these months. She has taken on the Christmas
cantada (a short presentation) with the women and children, and we are hoping
that our people we be faithful in the practices. Those women that are faithfully
coming to the practices don't know how to sing well, and those that hit and
miss, or just are not interested have the better voices.
I continue in home school with the kids. Kelsie is growing like a weed and is as
tall as Tule. Her work is getting lighter on me this year, though Russ' is still
a good bit of reading out loud. I make them read most of their classes out loud
to me (the reading parts in Science, history, etc) because they are submerged in
a Spanish only culture. I correct their pronunciation while reading and Kelsie
at least is doing pretty well in English. Her history class has about 20-30
pages each week to read. I am still trying to work on sermons while waiting on
the kids with one thing or another in the school.
Please pray for our support situation as from year to year things change in
churches, and we need more support to keep up with our needs both personal and
ministry, and our support slacks off each year. Our church on the field is
helping some, and they are paying the church rent and the other ministries
expenses of the church now. We still have our website, literature, and some
other ministry expenses, as well as computer and stuff that needs replacing soon.
I'm on my 4th power supply with this computer, and about my 5th keyboard. Both
monitors constantly freeze until they reset which is really disturbing (about
1-3 seconds), but considering they were used CRT monitors when I bought them (you
know the kind that is a big box as deep as wide). I think I paid $60 and $40 for
them. (I have a dual monitor system.)
I just get frustrated and make the dumb thing work one way or another or turn
the computer off and on again and reboot it or practice patience with it and
grin and bear it. Tule is writing her Bible studies for the women using my
computer, and she says she cannot understand how I can fight this thing day in
and day out.
I would like to mention a little about our website (both Spanish and English is
together). Basically I am studying for my sermons and the research I do for
sermons, tracts, and my books in Spanish, I do basic research work in English.
This findings (books, conclusions, and things) I put on my library website, and
I give them to Carlos (which helps me), and he formats them for a free Bible
program, e-sword. which we also post on my site. So far we still have 2 days to
go in October, but already we have had 16,765 unique visitors this month. They
have downloaded 24 Gigabytes (that's around 35 commercial CDs of information
just this month).
According to time spent on my website, we had 538 visitors that spent more than
1 hour browsing and reading. Another 1047 spent from 30 minutes to an 1 hour.
That is around 1000 hours of people's time spent on the website (not counting
the rest of that 16,000 that was less than 30 minutes each).
What people are looking at is pdf files, mp3 files (my sermons and our Spanish
hymnal). Specific pages are my index of my own books in spanish with 6,700 hits
this month. The E-Sword pages come in pretty high with a couple of thousand in
each of the principle pages (English/Spanish). Then my personal sermon index
page (spanish).
This month's hot tract is my tract on Darwinism (702 views), my book on
Halloween next. My tract on Benny Hinn is either 1 or 2 every month (this month
302 views).
My personal sermons, tracts, and books continue to be heavily downloaded on the
spanish side, and my library on the english side, and I have e-Sword help pages
and free books to download (around 1000 in English alone) and both English and
Spanish are heavily downloaded in e-Sword stuff.
I also am getting an email almost every day from somebody thanking me for the
website and the blessing it has been to them, especially Bible students. I have
had several write and tell me that my Spanish tract selection is what they use
in their church and ministry in evangelism. I have around 50 tracts. My Spanish
book page has around 35 books, and I have it set up where they can print 2 pages
to a physical page and fold it and staple it to make a book. That makes it
possible for individual churches to set up a book ministry with just a
photocopier. I charge nothing for anything because of our faithful monthly
supporters and because this is my conviction. The majority of those that use our
materials are low budget ministries or individuals paying for everything out of
their pocket.
So far I have had a couple of Bible Institutes also use these books for their
students. We even had a radio station in the Carribean that is using our MP3
hymns for background music for their programs.
Finally touching on technical things, I have to say that my email program
sometimes gets too heavy handed in filtering out emails to me. Either that or
the Internet is getting worse and worse. I regularly get around 700-2000 emails
per day, and out of that about all except 4-8 is junk mail. I have filters in
place, but people tell me that their emails are not getting through. IF YOU
WRITE ME, PLEASE PUT "e-Sword" or "missionary" in the body or "About/RE" line
because those are keywords that seem to get your stuff through to me. I prefer
you write me at
tech@davidcox.com.mx but don't repost this email on a church website or
anything because of junk mail.
Because of all that junk mail, I am going to try adding an RSS News Feed. For
those of your who don't know what that is, it is simply a web page (xml) on my
website. You set up your email program to check this RSS feed, and when I change
or add articles on it, it will show up as a headline with a line to go to the
page to read it. Once read it disappears from your news viewer. Please set your
RSS News Aggregator to
http://www.davidcox.com.mx/usa/our_prayer_letters/rssfeed.xml
If you don't know what this is or how to set it up, I will still be sending all
my email updates by regular email, and am considering going back to snail mail.
I will also post my prayer letters on my website prayer letter page
http://www.davidcox.com.mx/usa/our_prayer_letters/prayerletters.htm
We would ask for your continued prayers.
In Christ,
David and Tule Cox
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