Greetings from Philadelphia!
First of all, everyone is here, safe, and happy. We were warmly greeted by Bryan & Brian (Stoudt & Hollinger), Karen Fritz, and Susan Post, all of whom demonstrated their Philadelphian Brotherly Love by making us feel right at home. Our introduction to the community started with a bang… by which we mean fireworks. (No, not “fireworks”.) We even practiced prayer walking by walking around the local park. The praying part will come tomorrow; we believe in practicing one thing at a time to make sure we do things the right way. (Mom, that was a joke.)
For all you engineers out there, we have a question for you. We’ve been having weird power surges/outages that the resident electrical engineer cannot figure out. Here are a few observations:
1) When we turn on the downstairs A/C unit, everything shorts out and nothing works.
2) But when we turn on the 3 upstairs A/C units, everything works fine.
3) When the 3 upstairs units are NOT on, there is very DIM power downstairs.
So… what’s going on? Bonus points if you can explain with a circuit diagram and at least a rudimentary explanation of power capacitance & induction.
On a more serious note, we had a good time sharing about the paths that led each of us ultimately to SMI. Jenna received a mysterious email about SMI to an email account that she had only told family about and Kelli had taken the two weeks off as vacation before knowing that they coincided with SMI. All of the stories were unique, but the general theme was that God definitely had a hand in placing us each in the group. We also represent an array of medical backgrounds and look forward to meeting an even more diverse group of people in the days ahead: community members in churches, local Popeye’s, corner stores, and from door-to-door house visits.
God has been at work in our hearts before we arrived and we thank you all for your support and prayers. Please pray for sustained energy (literally and metaphorically… har de har har) and meaningful times of prayer, worship, and togetherness as we share time with each other so that we may share the Word with the community.
-Dave Chen & Kelli Ellis (with inspiration from Susanna Linton)
