Thankfulness – James & Carolanne https://ptc.jamesandcarolanne.com Serving God as a web programmer with Digital Strategies. Sun, 11 May 25 14:40:48 +0000 en-US Answered Prayer https://ptc.jamesandcarolanne.com/2019/06/25/answered-prayer Tue, 25 Jun 19 09:46:23 +0000 https://ptc.jamesandcarolanne.com/?p=2825 asking for prayer to remove a block placed on our advertising account by Facebook. I am very happy to report that God has answered our prayers and we have had our account reinstated. Praise the Lord for His mercy and for working on our behalf in the hearts of those at Facebook making these decisions. We have been depending on Facebook advertising to bring people to our sites and get engaged in dialog with mentors. This experience has highlighted for us the fact that we need to re-evaluate our marketing strategy and aim for a wider audience than just what we can find via Facebook advertising. Though we were doing some, it quickly became clear that we need expand our focus to a greater degree so that having one system drop out will not completely cripple our ability to continue ministry. Thank you for your continued prayer and support for us. God is continuing to use your prayers through us to reach people around the world.]]> The Recent Prayer Letter https://ptc.jamesandcarolanne.com/2017/12/12/the-recent-prayer-letter Tue, 12 Dec 17 14:53:40 +0000 https://ptc.jamesandcarolanne.com/?p=2679 Hi there! Most of you should now have received the end of year prayer letter that we recently sent out by mail.** Thank you for taking the time to take a look through it. We hope you like the family picture prayer card that was included. Getting kids to sit still and not make faces for a brief second to get a good picture is surprisingly hard! ? ** If you didn't happen to receive the letter, we would love to send it to you but we probably don't have proper address information. Let us know where to send it using our private contact form and we'll get you one as soon as we can. Thank you for upholding our ministry in prayer. (and for some of you financially as well) We really appreciate having you standing with us in the ministry. In the letter, I mentioned that we currently have a special donor who has pledged to match up to $100,000 of donations given to us or other staff members in the ministry. If you have not yet given toward this, I would like to encourage you again to consider taking advantage of this gift. During this time, any gift you give will have a matching gift given to The Life Project. That is TREMENDOUSLY helpful to us and to the ministry. We have been asked to put a special emphasis on trying to raise an additional $250 in MONTHLY donations. This means people who join our team and commit to give $50/$100/$200 or some other amount every month. If you let us know of your commitment, we can count the whole annual amount toward the matching. So, for example, if you decide to give or increase your gift $50 per month and let us know, we can count $600 toward the matching! Please do not feel pressured by any of this. If you are already giving or have been holding us up in prayer, we really do appreciate it. THANK YOU for sticking with us.

A Changed Life...

I did not want this entire letter to be about fundraising, so I went searching for a cool story of someone who's life is being changed by Jesus. I found John* who wrote in on one of our sites just a few days ago from Nigeria asking "If God is all knowing, did he knows those who will go to hell?, if he knows, then why did he created them?" He was connected with one of our more experienced mentors who replied that "God created each one of us and gave us free will, to either accept Him or reject Him. He is always waiting for each one of us to make that decision." The mentor also invited John to make a personal decision for himself to follow Jesus. Just a couple messages later, John writes "Thank you so much. I just invited Jesus into my life. I love the conclusion part of the prayer which says "make me the person you want me to be Lord"" Thank you for praying for people like John*, for this ministry and for us. Your gifts and your prayers allow us to continue serving here with The Life Project. * names changed for privacy If you would like to give a gift today online, you can do so on the secure giving form on The Life Project's website. I have included the link below. Give online to our ministry Give or help in some other way  ]]> It's Good To Be Appreciated https://ptc.jamesandcarolanne.com/2017/10/26/its-good-to-be-appreciated Tue, 17 Oct 17 16:49:03 +0000 https://ptc.jamesandcarolanne.com/?p=2667 Here are just a few of the many thanks we've received from our readers and mentees: "I used the mentor program at a very dark time in my life and it really helped to see my way back to Christ. Thank you, I had you when I had nothing else." “Both times that you have prayed for me, I’ve literally read it with tears rolling down my face. Nobody has ever been this nice to me. I’ve been pretty much abandoned by everyone in my family, both my husband’s side & mine, so for you to pray for me means the absolute world to me. I thank God for having me find this website!” "Thank you. Honestly I didn't think I would get a reply from the study. It honestly made my day. God knows exactly what we need. I want a relationship WITH him, not religion. ... Thank you so much for the articles and encouragement. God bless you!" "Your posts are a treasure and I am reading them all and taking notes! ... I'm so glad I found this site! A true encouragement for me! Thank you SO much!"

Your Gift Will Be Doubled!

Right now there is a financial donor who has pledged to match any extra donations that we receive over the next little while! This person will match up to $100,000 to The Life Project for any donations given towards our personal ministry. So if you give $500 to help support our ministry, this donor will give $500 to The Life Project general fund to support some of the other ministry expenses. Would you consider increasing your support or giving a special one-time gift to help both us personally and this ministry? Give to our ministry I want to help in some other way]]> Feb-Mar 2016 Newsletter https://ptc.jamesandcarolanne.com/2016/02/22/march-update Mon, 22 Feb 16 15:48:12 +0000 https://ptc.jamesandcarolanne.com/?p=2399 I hope you receive this. It has been incredible how God has used you in my life, particularly in the seasons of deep need. I have seen God be instrumental through you to reveal His hand of healing truth, love, and comfort. I will miss our times of communication, you mean a lot to me. Thank you for always being there to listen and give wisdom and discernment, especially to pray for me. My life has changed for the better for having your support and encouragement. Thank you so much for praying for and supporting us in this ministry. It is amazing to see how God uses my small part in this to touch the lives of people literally around the world. We even receive messages from people in places such as Iraq, Syria, India and China. It's so cool to be able to play a part in that sort of impact. Thank you for allowing us to continue to be a part of this ministry. Thank you for your prayer, and thank you for your financial help. Some Numbers For The Statistically Minded: For the 2015 fiscal year (July 1, 2014 - June 30, 2015) we saw the following: Incoming Messages Matched To Mentors: 83,537 Active Mentors: 1065 at fiscal end Chat Room Participants: 122,585 Indicated Decisions for Christ: 13,271 Organization Updates: As you may have heard, for the past while Power to Change has been searching for someone to fill the role of President. Rod Bergen was previously holding the Interim President position during the search, and has now accepted the full role of President of Power to Change. Additionally, Sheldon Kotyk has taken the reins of Director of The Life Project which is the ministry that I serve. Our mission statement is The world is online. We help them know Jesus. Read more about our team here. Support Status Update: As many of you know, my work with Power to Change is funded by monthly financial donations given by people like yourself who stand with me in the work that I do. I am very grateful for this team of donors and prayer supporters who allow me to continue working with the ministry. To date, my support level is around 50% of what it should be based on Power to Change guidelines of my salary and expenses. In light of the deficit, The Life Project has generously contributed a portion of the remainder to cover my ongoing salary. (being a non-profit, this basically means that someone else has had to raise the money on my behalf) The expectation is that I continue to try and raise the remaining amount as monthly donations. Please continue to pray that God will provide for our financial needs. For the past year or so I have also been working a second job (in addition to my full-time at PtC) to help with our family finances. Family Update: As a family, we have been doing very well. Carolanne continues to homeschool the kids and meets regularly with other homeschooling moms and groups in town for field trips and socializing times. We have quite a variety of homeschool related projects that take place around our house such as rock collections and research, hatching baby chicks, math assignments and lots of trips to the library to check out the latest reading materials. The kids are growing fast and have been quite excited about the prospect of going to Disneyland in a few months. We wanted to take them while they were at the right age to enjoy it, so we have been saving as a family for a few years now, and plan to go down later this spring with Grampy and Grammy. We hope to also visit some of our other family members and supporters in San Diego while in the neighborhood. Final Thoughts & Prayer Requests: Thank you again for standing with us in this ministry. Both Carolanne and I are very encouraged to have such faithful friends supporting us in prayer and financially. Please continue to pray about our financial situation. God has been so very faithful in providing for all our needs, and yet it still always seems to be a point of stress in our lives. Maybe He is still teaching us patience and reliance on Himself. Please pray also for our core team. (The Life Project) There has been quite a lot of change lately with financial cut-backs, and people being let go or moving on to other fields, and systems requiring changes, and leadership changes. Please pray for unity in the team and for God's provision for our ministry as a whole. Finally, please pray for our mentors. They truly are the front-line of the ministry, serving the people who come asking for help, and walking with them on the next steps of their spiritual journey. Please pray that they would be encouraged in their relationships. Often the mentors write to visitors and never get a response. Other times the "prayer requests" are so shallow or short that they almost seem to not be worth responding. And yet in some cases, some of our coolest salvation stories have come from short (or even empty) messages we have received from people who turned out to be in some far off country looking for help but unable to express it clearly. Thank you again, All the best, James & Carolanne Ben & Julia]]> Global Daily https://ptc.jamesandcarolanne.com/2013/10/22/global-daily-201311 Mon, 10 Feb 14 11:33:46 +0000 https://ptc.jamesandcarolanne.com/?p=2079 The Question: How has God blessed you recently and what challenges are you facing. One of the things we try to do regularly as a family when we pray is to remember to thank God specifically for the many ways in which He has blessed us.  We HAVE been blessed in SO many different ways and we are so very grateful that God has allowed us to walk with Him on this journey through life.  He has blessed us with close family, good neighbours, each-other, a nice place and area to live, a good car and good friends.  He has blessed us with His guidance, His faithfulness, His peace, His undeserved love and most over all, His Son.  He has blessed us with the opportunity to serve Him, to use the gifts He has given to us to reach others with the gospel and with many faithful friends who pray for us and support us faithfully each month.  We are blessed to have you on our team, and we are blessed to be a part of this ministry.  Thanks to you and thanks to God for standing with us in this. Regarding the challenges we face, we remain in need of some financial support.  We also have been working through a process of refining our purpose as a technical team.  We don't have enough staff or resources to develop a lot of new software and we have been making some hard decisions regarding what we can and cannot do. Praise the Lord for His faithfulness though.  We know and trust that He is in control and is leading us in the path we need to take.  He is good and His love endures forever.]]> Global Daily - March 2012 https://ptc.jamesandcarolanne.com/2012/02/22/global-daily-march-2012 Wed, 22 Feb 12 11:30:17 +0000 https://ptc.jamesandcarolanne.com/?p=1588 TheLife Card As a symbol of their commitment we challenge followers of Christ to sign TheLife card as a physical reminder of that commitment.  We also encourage them to be held accountable to their decision by signing up on thelife.com and having one or more of their friends hold them accountable to the steps they are taking. Many years ago in high-school I wrote a mission statement for my life and it read something like this:
I intend to do God’s will for my life when ever, where ever, and what ever, for His glory, in regards to my calling, those I date, my future wife, my future family, and my job. I intend to put His will first in every aspect of my existence and want to honour Him with all my life.
In helping to develop thelife.com I have felt honoured and blessed to have been given the opportunity to do exactly that, and to help design something which would allow others to make similar commitments. Developing the website for this challenge has taken the vast majority of my time for the past few months meaning I've had little time to focus on much of anything else.  It has been a difficult project, but very rewarding as now there are already over 500 people who have joined. My prayer requests for this site would be for God to use it powerfully in the lives of believers around the world and that it would not only result in Christians getting serious about their faith,  but also in many others being told about God's good news of great joy that is for all people.]]>