I am on Eleuthera, thanks to a lot of you.  I am having more difficulty getting this blog posted than I had getting to Eleuthera.  Today is a day for some new things.  My small plane experience has been primarily taking off and landing at the same airport.  Not today.  Thanks to Steve Merritt of Bahamas Habitat, it was wheels up at 8:30 am near Raleigh,NC, and touch down at 2:25 this afternoon at North Eleuthera Airport, with a mid way stop in Orlando, FL.

My thanks to Rev Gene Zimmerman who joined us in Orlando.  Gene invited this ministry into existence, and he is accompanying me on this first weekend.  And my thanks for the support of First UMC, Jackson, TN.  And special thanks to just about everybody who even knows about this blog, for your prayerful and financial support.

I am on Eleuthera, and we spent most of this day delivering and relocating materials and tools and people in preparation for the work that is ahead.  It was good to reconnect with many of the people with whom we will be working, and to revisit places where we will be working.

Osbourne Weech met us at the airport.  Osbourne is the local pastor in Current and the construction foreman for the Zion Children's Home.  The Children's Home was our first stop.  Earmily Munroe and Geleta Tournquest, the visionaries behind ZCH, were proud to show us one cottage completed.  It lacks only minor finishes before it can become the home of a new family of children.  The second cottage still needs a couple of weeks of construction work before it is ready for furniture, finishes, and children.

Next, we went to Bahamas Methodist Habitat's Camp Symonnette.  We were delighted to see the staff and to share a meal, together with two work teams who are finishing their weeks of service with BMH.  The director of BMH, Abraham McIntyre, will be returning this weekend from a month of intensive pilot training.  He and I will be taking the first steps in a project that includes an electrical service change, upgrade, and complete rewiring of the Camp Symonnette facility.

Tomorrow, Gene Zimmerman and I will have a couple of meeting that will begin to shape the pastoral dimension of my work.  Mid day we will meet Mr Phil Pinder, who is the lay leader of the Methodist Church in Spanish Wells.  Later in the afternoon, we will meet with Rev John Baldwin, who is the elder serving Harbor Island Methodist Church, and the elder appointed to the North Eleuthera Methodist circuit.  These conversations will clarify something of the scope and possibility of the work that will be focused in the congregations.  This is a very exciting aspect of this ministry's potential.

Tonight we are resting in the Methodist manse on Harbor Island.  It has been a very good day.  We are under way.  Thank you.  Thanks be to God.

Grace and peace.