I’ve spent most of my thinking about my brother Tito Ruiz.  He went in to the hospital today to have a hernia operation.  Please pray for Tito!

I’m trying to rest.  Been really pushing it lately.  My back is still hurting from loading those bags of ice.  I must be getting old.

Took Kathy out to eat.  We enjoyed that time together.

I need to exercise, but I just feel tired.

Guess that means I need to rest!

Pray for me while I’m driving and smiling!

Ashley and I had a great time today at Perimeter Church! 

These last two weekends were focused on serving with the Compassion In Action weekend.  Today they had a mission fair to raise awareness of local opportunities to plug in.
Vanessa is one of the ladies who wants to plug in with us!

Some of my favorite partners were there in particular Chip Sweeney. 

We’ve worked together since the beginning of our ministries here in Atlanta.  It’s been wonderful to see how God has worked in the last ten years!
Debra Potter is my main partner at Perimeter–she’s the leader of the local missions department! She and Jackie Deiter have provided great leadership!

These two ladies, Cheryl and Carolyn served in one of our apartment complexes last weekend. God provided just the right person to help her witness to around twenty Mexican men. Now they plan on starting a Bible Study there!

Bad news is that my camera decided to die on me today. I’d had problems with it a couple of days ago. Today, while I was shooting a picture of a little girl’s cowboy boots, my camera stopped functioning.

Here’s the last, blurry cowboy boot picture. How sad.

Very sad. I’ve probably taken over 10,000 pictures with it so I reckon I got my money’s worth!
My new camera is the Canon Elph Sure Shot 880. It’s the 750’s big brother.

We had such a fantastic day!

Around 300 volunteers from First Baptist Atlanta hosted block parties in 25 different apartment complexes around Metro Atlanta. 

Derrick Posten was my partner for this project. He did a terrific job!

17 of the 25 teams came back for the debriefing. 

78 professions of faith were reported by those 17 teams!

Amazing stories of whole families coming to Jesus where the high point of my afternoon.

I appreciated having Keith Harrell along for the ride today. 

He and Bill Hickey helped me clean and put up the 25 grills we took to First Baptist.

Today I was supposed to go teach a class at the North American Mission Board in Alpharetta.  I called to verify the time and they informed me that the meeting was changed to next week!

I went on over to Clarkston to meet with Grace and Tim Hatch, some of our newest NAMB missionaries.  We were going to the board together.  When I told them about the schedule change they went on back to Covington.

I called up Bennett so we could go over the details of the Help a Child Smile program. 

We’d like to get their mobile dental units over to Indian Creek Elementary School, where many of our refugee kids attend.  I think we’ll be able to go see the Principle of that school soon.

Came home and worked on my email.

Then went for a hike up Stone Mountain.  What a beautiful day!


I’m really looking forward to Impact Atlanta tomorrow!  25 locations!

I had Ashley and Jesse with me today!  Yeah!

We started out a Kroger picking up the supplies for the big event this weekend:  Impact Atlanta at First Baptist Atlanta.  I’m really looking forward to it.

Derrick Posten is my partner helping with this!

Lots of stuff!

After we picked it up we drove to FBA to drop it off. The bags of ice were the hardest to deal with.

Then over to First Baptist Church of Doraville to pick up the grills that Bill and I worked on yesterday.

We also dropped by Guitar Center to pick up some small supplies.  My guitar needed a stand to set it on. GC has a special section for vintage guitars. Check out the price tags!

Went through my email.  I’ll post pix and put ’em on the blog.  Then go back to Kroger to do the family shopping.

Hope to run my 4 miles later.

Big things on the horizon!

This Saturday is Impact Atlanta, the largest single evangelistic outreach in the city!  We’ll be hosting Outreach Events in 25 different apartment complexes simultaneously!  We’ll mobilize about 400 people that day.

Of course there’s a lot of logistic prep work to make something like that happen.

Today I focused on the grills for the event. I called Bill Hickey to come and help me with the grills.

I had to come up with 25 that worked.  I had 17 that my partners at Perimeter Church had given me.  We’d cleaned and stored them outside behind the church under tarps.  They looked great.

We were short 8 grills so I went to Walmart to pick up some more.  I got them for $9.95 each.  Not bad.  And they’re pretty sturdy!

Bill and I had to put the new grills together.

After we got all the grills organized I came home to work on other admin stuff.

Very exciting emails every night from people interested in working with us!

God is up to something BIG!

This evening I took my family to City Diner.

I love their gyros and french fries! And the desserts! Art that you eat.

Please pray for Impact Atlanta and thank God for the rain we had today!

As I looked at my schedule for the next couple of weeks I thought, “Maybe I should take the day off.”  Yeah, right.  Lots of days in a row . . .

I started out visiting with friends at FBC Mountain Park.  We’re getting the date organized for October 19th when Keith and Cornelia Harrell and Ashley get commissioned.  I think that will be super cool!

Enjoyed sharing what’s going on with Jerry Clower and Kevin Lamb–two staff members at our church.

Touched base with the Kroger folks again to make sure they’ll have everything ready for us to pick up this Thursday.  They wanted to know if we wanted these super big bags of charcoal.  We could split them in half and save a little money.  Any of you guys deal with charcoal?  Last thing I want to do is to start splitting up those messy bags!  Everything looks to be sitting on dead ready.  I’ll keep going over there, just in case.

Our board at Whirlwind Mission is committed to supporting our missionaries as well as extreme needs.  We’ve been working with Pastor Jeff from Haiti for about 6 months now.

Last month the same hurricane that messed up Atlanta’s gas totally wrecked Haiti.  It could be years (if ever) before the infrastructure of bridges gets rebuilt.  People are really starving and facing terrible water borne diseases.  I’m glad we could help out financially, thanks to YOU!

Jeff seems interested in coming back to working with us in the States with NAMB.  I’ll help him get that process in order.  He’s already served with NAMB so he only needs a new request.  I took him over to a couple of apartment complexes where we have work in the area and introduced him to the managers.  He seems excited about this new direction.  Of course he’ll continue to return to Haiti from time to time to help with the churches and schools that he’s started.

Remember when Ashley and I had a video shoot with NAMB?

Today I went over to Grace Fellowships (one of my favorites!) for some help.

Erik McNair is on their video team.

They’ll help dub off the video into a format that we can edit on our computers.  I’m looking forward to working on that project once we have the video!

This afternoon after I got home I had a chance to walk around in the forest a bit.  One of my new interests is in mushrooms.  I’m reading a really great book called “Mycellium Running.”
Sounds to me like fungi can fix just about every problem we have ecologically!

There are strains of mushrooms that actually eat oil and convert it to natural substances that other animals can feed on. That’s great news for areas with toxic spills!

God is so cool to invent all this stuff!

It’s always such fun to have my son with me!

Jesse had an appointment with his Doctor today.  Dr. Evans was very pleased with Jesse’s progress and told us to come back in three months! It’s been two months since his last visit.  Looks promising!  We still don’t know when/if J will have a trial yet.  Keep praying for his healing–it’s Working!

We went to shoot pictures of the two new missions at Highland North and Highland at Sutton Place.


There’s so much work to be done on Buford Highway.

We’ll be covering these two locations this Saturday with Impact Atlanta and First Baptist Church Atlanta.  We’ll host Outreach Events in 25 locations this weekend.

I bought Jesse an acoustic guitar today.  I get great deals on Alvarez guitars at Miller Music in Chamblee.  It’s black.  Looks like something Johnny Cash would play.

We went over to Azalea to help the kids with their home work.  Writing numbers in expanded form.  Know how to do that?  Uses powers of 10.

Also got to see Miguel.  He’s a known gang banger who is trying to change his ways.  He’s like a son to me.  He recently graduated from high school with his GED.  We gave him a gift card from Walmart to buy some new clothes. Doesn’t he look better?

He has to get rid of all his gang colors.  Cops still hassle him.  No surprise really.  Especially if he LOOKS like he’s in a gang.

Remember Uncle Harold who came to visit me last week?  We had such a great time with the Bengali family who lives above our mission at Azalea.  I told them I’d see if I could get them a computer.  This afternoon we took them one.

Bill Hickey helped set it up and gave them a lesson on it.

I was given some baby dolls last week that one of the dear ladies at FBC Doraville made for me. It was fun to see the girl’s faces when they received their gift!

Came home and ran 4 miles.

Pray for our new partners coming on board and that our missionaries will continue to work well together.  It’s a challenge when we all have such strong personalities!

What a great day!

Perimeter has been such an important part of our work in Atlanta and today they showed their true colors once again!

We had well over 500 people participate in about 50 projects around Atlanta.  Whirlwind Missions hosted ten block parties with them today.

I had a chance to greet people at church and then do a short training session on how to get people rounded up to come to the event as well as how to do balloon animals.  That’s always fun!

I spent the entire afternoon at Sturbridge Square which is one of our new mission points!  The manager was very friendly to me and offered us the entire upstairs area to do an after school program.  It’s a huge amount of space.  I’ve very excited to work on getting a team to come help us there.  Please pray for that.

We rounded up over 50 kids and their parents.  There were probably at least 100 people that came to the event!  That’s awesome, especially since it was the first time we’d ever done anything there.  PTL.

I led a young man named Drexel Davis to the Lord!  I watched three others accept Christ today.  Amen! It’s a beautiful thing!

I had a fantastic day today working with 12 Stone–one of my favorite churches!


Today, all around Atlanta, people are giving back to their communities.  I’m glad that our churches are playing a major role in that!

It was a beautiful morning to travel to Lawrenceville where 12 Stone’s church is located.

After a prayer and worship time, the congregation covered over 60 projects.

We hosted 5 block parties and a construction site with Whirlwind Missions.

We had a terrific time interacting with the folks at the Falls, one of our newest missions.

The time was made even better because my brother Pastor Tito Ruiz brought a group from his congregation at Stone Mill Church.


It was great to see him again and help reach out into the Falls community!
I’m looking forward to hosting TEN block parties tomorrow with my partners at Perimeter Church!