Dear Praying friends,

I know I just sent out a prayer update a few days ago, but I wanted to mention something about Tabasco that I forgot to mention. I also had another version of that last prayer letter (Nov 2) prepared that got lost and here I found it. It had all the statistics from my website that I think is a little more explicit. I worked hard to get those numbers (below) and then lost the email for a while, so I am adding this old version on the bottom of this one present prayer letter. Sorry for the reduncancy.

As we watch the news, there is a few things that you might want to pray about. They say 80% of the state of Tabasco is flooded. The TV pictures down here and the news says that most of these places have between 4 feet and 8 feet of water. Around 1 million who have lost their homes. Very few confirmed dead so far.

The entire nation of Mexico is donating for these people, but the trucks and helicopters just are not getting very much through to them yet because of the water not going down. Only in the fringes of the flood area is any of this aid getting in. They are starting to loot food stores, and some are looting houses and other things. Please pray for them. Our church here is taking up food goods for them, and yesterday we voted to take church funds and buy food goods and take it to a donation center.

NEW RSS FEEDS OF PRAYER LETTERS

I continue to wage a losing battle against unwanted emails on my server. As such, I have Spamassasin and filters and other such stuff that keep out junk supposedly. I decided to start using an RSS feed of the prayer letters, and if you know how to set up a RSS feed, your email client will advise you of when there is a new prayer letter, and a link so that you can click on it and download it. I think this is best so that my prayer letter emails don't get junked by other's filters.

Our Website
We want to thank you our supporters and prayer supporters for allowing us to represent you out here on the mission field. I think part of our individual ministry that shows the great need of Christian workers is what is happening on our small insignificant website. October was our best month to date with somewhere around 26 Gigabytes of traffic this month (another 12 Gigabytes by direct downloads and transfers). We had 18,277 unique visitors, 25,000 visits, and 147,000 pages viewed (US and Unkown make up 120,000 of that). Of those 18,277 unique visitors, about 17,318 "Added to Favorites" at least one of my pages! This is about 4 times what we had last year this month. Mexico was the next country from which our visitors came from with some interesting others in the list of English and Spanish speaking countries. We had 333 pages viewed from people in Japan! Brazil viewed 228 pages, and France 205!

Our visitors viewed our website and this perhaps tells you a little about what they were doing on my website. There is a statistic which I have access to on my server that tells how long each visitor stayed on the website viewing things. Those who stayed more than 1 hour were 614, from 30minutes to 1 hour were 1186, and 15minutes to 30minutes were 1187. Taking the minimal number from each, somebody(ies) had a page of my website open on their computer for a total of 1,444 hours this past month! I think they were studying or something because I don't have much in the way entertainment on my website.

I can see what people are putting into the search engine to get to my website, and the top keyphrases they are looking for is e-Sword, followed by "david cox", "theory of Charles Darwin" (in spanish), Homiletics (in spanish), "Sunday School" (in Spanish - I have a large coloring page library of images that people can download, printout and then pass out in Sunday School to the children to color with crayons). Next comes "Binny Hinn", tracts (in Spanish), "Jehova's Witness" (in Spanish), ornography (I took the "p" off of it so it won't get caught in Internet filters. This is a sermon and tract on the subject.)

My Spanish Book Page of My Writings
For example, I have written around 29 small (30 to 100 pages) books that I have uploaded to my website in various formats so that people can read them online, download them, give them away, or print them for personal or church use. The index page for my books in Spanish had 7,300 visitors during the month of October. My Halloween book was viewed 515 times, my book against abortion 283x, alcoholism 279x, How to prepare a Sermon 223x, my Homiletics book 197x, baptism book 162x, etc.

Not only have I posted these files, but I have also a special pdf file format where the pages are longwise, with two pages of the book on one page, so that they can print the book, and photocopy it the amount they want, and then assemble it with a stapler in the middle of the page to make a half letter size book (Clickbook is software I use to make this format). All this is completely free of course. What amazes me is that I just put up this format of my books in October, and already those files are being downloaded more than the others. The Halloween book pdf book was downloaded 515x, but apart from the pdf file, the Internet online version was viewed 382x. But the clickbook version of the pdf file was downloaded 207x! I have no idea how many copies was made by those 207 people, but it would lead me to believe that there are a lot of Christians who are hungry for good Bible studies.

The top clickbook downloads October 2007, this there first month, were: (1) Halloween 207x, (2) Homiletics 197x (3) Hermenetuics 100x, (4) David Yonggi Cho (false Pentecostal teacher) 84x (5) Forgiveness 80x (6) Why we should congregate? 74x, (7) my book on why we don't worship the Virgin Mary 69x.

On my Spanish tract page for October 2007, darwinism is the top tract 789x, the BennyHinn 341x, Halloween 214x, Mary 175x. On my sermons (my personal sermons in Spanish) the general index page was hit by 652x, 2005 219x, 2006 301x, 2007 648x. Top sermons (text) downloaded were Biblical Marriages 145x, Halloween 126x, Our Spiritual Warfare 93x. Top sermons (mp3) downloaded were "I would see God" 38x, "Tithing" 31x, Marriage 23x, Halloween 23x, "Foundation of Rock: Satanism" 21x, Hermeneutics 12x, Abortion 20x.

Even though God has not given us a large ministry here in Mexico City, it appears that God is opening points of ministry around the world. I am corresponding with a pastor in India, because he was very impressed with my writings and wants friendship. We have contact with people all over the world which ask questions and are seeking help. Most of these are in Spanish, but some in English. One was from the Ivory Coast (wanting us to support him).

In general most of the people have only praise, and a very small portion are critical. I wish I had time and energy to put more time into my website, but I feel that my duties as pastor is more important. Almost all of what I do for the website is simply spin offs of my preaching and witnessing ministries here. What I prepare for the church, I reseach in English and find good books and stuff and put it on my website.

Please pray for us because we are starting to get more and more individuals and churches that are requesting actual books and tracts from us for evangelistic campaigns, their own church use, Bible study, Bible Institutes, etc. When they write to us, I usually (up to date) send them whatever they want and I pay the shipping and printing. We would like to do this on a larger scale, but I do not want to "market" the Lord. I feel that there is a rule of freely we have received, freely we should give. So I don't charge for the ministry I do for people, not even in our own church. Having that position means I pay for everything out of my pocket, and then ask for donations from who receives the books, and most are poor and without funds.  There are several missionary "book printing" ministries around, but after talking to them, they want the copyright on everything, they charge the same as any Christian bookstore, and they keep all the profits. That is on top of getting half a million dollars from missions funds of churches to buy printing presses and pay salaries. We don't do that. They don't do what they do for free or even at any discount.

Please pray for us that God would provide funds in time for us to reach more people with this literature ministry.

FEEDBACK ON MY WEBSITE
This is an email from a Pastor that I received that I thought you might like to see.
 

Brother Cox,

greetings in the name of the Lord.

THANK YOU so very much for your tremendous website. By far, this is the most helpful
e-sword site I've been to. I started using E-Sword about 3 years ago, but only found
your site about 8 weeks ago.

WHAT A BLESSING! I, like you, am in full time gospel ministry. Some of the materials
I've downloaded off of your site have greatly enriched my Bible study. Especially
helpful have been
  a.. Barclay's NT studies
  b.. TWOT
  c.. Wuest
  d.. Evans' Bible Doctrines (a book I used in college)
  e.. Anderson's works
  f.. Berkhof's Intro to NT
  g.. Burton's Greek
Some of these works are classics in their field - and I didn't even own paper copies!

I hope others with the tools at your disposal will continue to take these "out of
copyright" works that are still classics in their respective fields and convert them
to e-sword.

Thank you so very much, and may God bless you for your labor of love!

Dave Thomason