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Starting a new year somehow pushes a reset button in my mind and life seems fresh and new. How exciting to turn over a fresh page with renewed goals, eager to make use of the opportunities ahead.
We have no clear idea how much time is left before the night comes and our work will be over. We don’t know if our work with Loaves & Fishes will be ended by the plans of men in this godless society. But we fully suspect that time is running out.
We have a mission, a purpose, and a plan. By God’s grace, we will relentlessly persevere until our work is done.
This work is not accomplished by one or two people. God has put together a team with the variety of skills required to get the job done. I would like to introduce you to the individual members of our team.
First I want to acknowledge God. Without God we can do nothing, but with Him, we can do all things. He answers our prayers, opens doors, and gives us wisdom in our work.
My dad had a burden for producing literature for prisoners back when I was a small boy. Without his vision, zeal, and direction, Lighthouse Publishing probably wouldn’t exist today.
He is out of the office part of the year raising flowers, but still a pillar in the ministry. He has the role of handyman, mechanic, furniture maker, and counselor. Mom and the girls help with our mailings and other small jobs.
This is me, or rather, us. I enjoy thinking up new projects and getting other people involved to make it happen. I love the challenge of leading the Loaves & Fishes team and designing the layout.
I write newsletters and brainstorm ways to get more people excited about helping us publish Loaves & Fishes. It is rewarding to see people get a vision of reaching masses in prison through literature.
Rosanne (my sister) does our bookkeeping and processes mail from prisoners. This includes managing subscriptions and fulfilling requests for Bibles and other literature.
Anthony loves arranging his own words and those of others to create strong and clear communication. He also likes deleting commas.
He first started working at Lighthouse in 2004, when his family moved to Pikeville. Now he lives in Oklahoma with his wife and children. His main work here is editing documents for Loaves & Fishes and final polishing the newsletters.
Josh is in North Carolina. He also has an obsession with words. He’s been with us for a few months now and assists Anthony in editing text documents as we have work for him. We are thankful to have another set of critical eyes to run over each piece of content that goes into the magazine.
Mike lives in New York and helps with Loaves & Fishes graphics. He has an interest in photography and is enthused about volunteering his time for the cause of Loaves & Fishes.
His job includes downloading photos, adjusting lights and darks, and saving the final edit in Dropbox, ready to place into the Loaves & Fishes layout.
Raphael is a web developer and programmer from North Carolina. He is donating his time to develop a program that we will use to manage subscriptions and donations. It will tie all the subscribers, donors, literature requests, and Adopt-a-Prisoner writers into one database.
It is web-based, which means our staff will be able to log in from anywhere to do their work and everyone can work in the database at the same time.
This new system will be many times more efficient and make it a lot easier to track the return on fund-raising efforts.
Besides the above, we have hundreds of supporters who stand with us to pray and donate their money for the cause. Without them, we could not do this work.
As I mentioned before, we were able to ship the last issue of Loaves & Fishes in November.
We are preparing the new issue and hope to wrap it up by the middle of January. Once we have $17,000 to go toward this project, we plan to get them printed. As of today (December 28) we are almost halfway there.
I would love to see another issue go out the first of March, three months after the previous issue. With God’s blessing and the help of a team, it is certainly within reach.
May God’s peace and joy be upon your lives as you continue to seek His purposes.
For the Kingdom,
Lavern Gingerich
