Hands Headlines

With a few trash bags, poster board and black magic markers, the kids and I created some homemade cow attire for our family to join in Chick-fil-a’s National Cow Appreciation Day!  It took a little convincing to get the “bull” of the family to participate.  :)  But with the promise of free food, David agreed to don his “Eat Mor Chikin” sign and go along with us. You can read more about it at Chick-fil-a.com’s Press Room (Cow Clad Customers Receive Free Food article): http://www.easyir.com/easyir/prss.do?easyirid=DBFB1D64C24D0B90

Here’s the photo evidence…

We’d like to be moving to Orlando soon, but have not yet reached our minimum financial partnership goal to make this possible.

Our plans were to be moving in June/July, but the Lord has the best plan in mind.  It has been said, “Man plans and God laughs.”

Q:  “When do you think you’ll be moving?”
A: We’re realizing that what we think and expect is always subject to God’s timing.  Our desire was to be moving by June/July, but that won’t be possible.  We pray the Lord will provide the remaining support we need by August.

Q:  “Are you still waiting on your house to sell?”
A: Yes.  It’s still on the market.  We are regularly having several “looks” and calls, but so far no offers.  We aren’t too anxious about it at this point because if the house sells tomorrow then we are still not able to move to Orlando until the needed financial partnership is provided.

Q: “When do you start your new assignment in Orlando?”
A:  As soon as the Lord provides the new financial partnership needed, we sell our house and can pack up everything here.  Our new assignment is technically on hold until then.  All of our leaders with Campus Crusade in Orlando are very committed to seeing our financial support at a strong level before we move.

As of today, we’ve seen some good progress in finding new financial partners to support us regularly, yet we still have a long way to go!  This map is an illustration of how far we have yet to travel – in terms of needed monthly financial commitments – before we are able to move to Orlando, FL.

(For those of you who like to do the math:  Orlando is about 450 miles from Atlanta; We’ve seen the Lord provide about $510 out of the needed $2400/month in additional support; . . . so the corresponding ratio yields 95 miles traveled out of the total 450!)

Getting the entire Hand clan to sit still enough for a picture isn’t a cake walk!

However, we did recently visit Portrait Innovations to have some family portraits made. They did a super job.

If you want to see a bunch of the kids pics as well as several others we’ve posted on Flickr, a photo sharing site.

See our photos here.

Easy Way to Receive Email Summary of New Posts on Our Site

We’ve revamped our site to post new photos, updates, prayer requests and more on a fairly frequent basis. Our desire is to connect with you in short little snippets, giving you more of a porthole view into our family and ministry.

If you want to receive these web updates via email, then sign up below.

An email summary will be sent by FeedBlitz only once on any day that there are new posts on HandsHeadlines. And, yes, it is FREE both for us and for you.

NOTE: If your email service uses a spam or ‘junk mail’ filter, you may need to change the settings to allow incoming mail from FeedBlitz.com

You may Unsubscribe at any time.
*Rest Assured* - We’ve used the Feedblitz service for a while to get updates from other web sites. It is totally safe. Signing up will not increase junk mail coming to you.

To read an RSS feed, you’ll need to use a program that can receive and read RSS. Many people use programs called RSS readers to manage and read their RSS subscriptions. There are many RSS readers available for all computer platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.), and many of them are free. One of the more popular free RSS readers is SharpReader (visit www.sharpreader.net for details); there are many others available to try out.

What if I’d Rather Just Use Email?
See our related post about an easy way to receive an Email Summary of new posts. Click here.


How Can I Use Google to Read an RSS Feed?

One of the easiest ways we have found to subscrible to and read RSS Feeds is by using Google Reader. (More about Google Reader) Here’s a great tutorial: http://andywibbels.com/flash/google_reader.htm
(This is a very good, brief audio-visual demonstration of Google Reader. Make sure you turn on your computer speakers. You can pause the presentation by clicking the “Stop/Play” button at the bottom of the screen.)


So how do I subscribe to Hands Headlines RSS Feed?

It’s fairly straightforward:

If you use Google, see the instructions above. Or just. . .

1. Set up a program to read RSS feeds.
2. Create a new channel in your RSS reader program with the URL of the feed to which you’d like to subscribe. Each RSS reader program has its own way of subscribing to a feed, so follow the instructions for whichever program you’re using. The URL for our feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/HandsHeadlines - copy and paste this address into your program.
3. That’s it! Once you’ve created your new channel, you are subscribed to that feed and will receive new content automatically whenever it is posted.

What IS RSS?
RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” and is a popular way for websites to syndicate their content. When you subscribe to our RSS feed, you can receive that content as soon as it’s published, without the need to visit the HandsHeadlines web site. No longer will you have to remember how to spell “HandsHeadlines.com” Nor will you need to tie a string on your finger to remember to visit our site!

The RSS Feed shows you only the newest content which has been posted. Subscribing to any RSS feed is FREE.

Can I Receive an RSS Feed by Email?
YES, it is very easy. Click here for more information.


This is the generally accepted symbol for RSS. You may have seen this or a similar button on some web sites which offer RSS feeds. If you click on it, it will show you the RSS “raw feed.” When viewed as a web page, the RSS Feed might look like gibberish. You may be able to read the titles and see some pictures, but it won’t look like a normal web page in your browser. You’ll need a special progam called a RSS Reader or a Feed Reader to view the feed. (See “How to Subscribe to Our Site via RSS” )

Why Should I Care About RSS?
In the near future, newer verions of Internet Explorer or whatever Web Browser you use to look at web pages will have the ability for you to view RSS feeds automatically. (A few already do have this capability) Since this will save time in viewing updates from all your favorite sites, RSS will become more and more popular.

James 5:16 “The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.”


Recently we invited several folks from our church family to come over to our house simply for an evening of prayer. It was on a Friday night no less, but we were encouraged that our den was filled with 10-11 good friends who spent an hour interceding with us and for us. Perhaps we should have done this much sooner. It was a definite boost. And, I dare say that several prayers have been answered already.

What was the focus of our time? As you probably know, we have been fervently trusting the Lord to allow us to move to Orlando to begin our new role with Campus Crusade for Christ’s Global Technology Office. Several things haven’t exactly worked out according to our plan and timing. Obviously the Lord is in control yet we wanted to seek His will. We wanted to ask Him for some breakthroughs and simply for us to rejoice in Him working even through frustrations and delays.

It was a very good time in His presence and we felt more connected to our good friends from church who love us so dearly.

To guide our prayer time, I made an outline with Scriptures to focus on and general themes. You can see the file (a pdf file - open with Adobe Reader) here: http://handsheadlines.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/2006_Hands_Prayer_Meeting_Notes.pdf

I thought this might be helpful for anyone who is praying through similar issues. 

Also see what we shared at church during the worship service a couple of months ago.