Good Morning Beruit

Good Morning Beruit
Originally uploaded by Emamd.

From e-mail. I believe the family in Beruit are(were) members at my dad's church. Either way they're friends with members of the church. (note: the photo is from flickr and not the sender of the e-mail.

Dear Friends,
Thank you so much for your patience. I have been so extremely busy trying to organize a system for food purchase, storage, and distribution. None of us has had any training in this area, but we praise the Lord for sustaining us and using us mightily to lift up His wonderful name. We have a team of volunteers who are working six days a week in order to unload the food from the pickup trucks, parcel it out, load it in to the church vans to take to the schools or public spaces where refugees have taken refuge. So far we have distributed food to more than 2500 families in our major church in Beirut called the Karantina church. I do not have a final count of all the food distributed by other Alliance churches in other areas or by our other partner churches in eight other locations.
Gasoline shortage has forced us to change our strategy and start distributing food to refugees on church premises. Today for the first time, the Israeli airplanes raided our own area where [a] few important bridges were destroyed. We were feeling secure up to this point. This recent developments has hampered our relief distribution efforts for few and it will have a tremendous effect for the future. Seeing that we were unsure about how widespread these attacks were going to be, we suspended all our program for a few hours to make sure that our volunteers are not on the roads. We resumed food distribution just before noon and went on till 6:00 p.m., but we did not send our vans out on the streets. The destruction of the bridges just north of Beirut has made supplying the city with much needed supplies more difficult, more expensive, and dangerous. We are bracing ourselves for a very difficult couple of weeks. So please continue to pray for us, I can feel some disappointment and frustration in our volunter team for they are all very tired and are expecting the worst now.
Today, I have tried to bring as many supplies as possible to our very small storage room, but what we have is not enough to meet the needs if things get as a bad as we think they will.
This is a quick update. Sorry I cannot write a full-blown report right now, for I am extremely busy trying to get things in order to keep our ministry going. It looks that there is no end in sight, so we are all in a survival mode right now. A few days ago, I moved my family to the church campus in Beirut because of the shortage in gasoline. This way we do not have to be on the road everyday. But, the bombing of the bridges has made us all apprehensive, since our church is situated about 200 meters (600 ft.) away from one major bridge connecting the northern suburb of Beirut to the city center. The apartment in which we were staying has a glass facade. Any bombing of the scale we have seen so far, will definitely shatter the glass and we risk being injured. So I sent my family up to Anna's parents where there is nothing to be bombed and I stayed in the city to oversee the relief distribution operation.
In the midst of all this, I would like you to know that the Lord is being glorified and lifted up. Many people are receiving a copy of the Bible/NT and we are having many opportunities to share Christ with Muslim refugees. One of the girls that my wife took care of when she had an infected tooth and made sure she gets her antibiotics and some dental care, said to Anna, "I wish I would always be sick so that I can spend more time with you." On Sunday, Anna drove a van full of people to church who were absolutely amazed at how the Christian believers are helping them even though they considered them to be the cultural/political enemies.
On Thursday night, we had had a meeting of all our volunteers in order to pray and praise God as a group and share some thoughts on how the Lord has been working through our ministsry. It was a great time of sharing of stories and lessons we have learned as Christians in trying to deal with this whole situation. Some of the 7 Muslim families that took refuge in our church were also there with us singing with us and praising Christ our Lord and blessing his name. One Muslim lady shared how much our ministry has meant to her and her family. She is a Brazilian citizen and had a chance to leave her family behind and evacuate with the Brazilians that left Lebanon. She thanked us for allowing them to stay at the church because this kept her family together.
Please continue to pray for our safety and for boldness to speak the truth of Christ in love for a people hungry to hear a word of hope. Our hope in Christ means a lot to them. They are puzzled by our love. They help us when they can and every now and then I see a Christian with a Muslim sharing with them the love of Christ.
Yes our days are dark. They may get even darker in the coming few weeks. Strangely, I am reminded of the words of Gandalf the gray wizard in the land of Moria when Frodo was complaining about the fact that he got to be the ring bearer. Gandalf said, "So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." I know this is not the Bible, but it is insightful. We cannot worry about tomorrow and the "why." At this point, we have to decide what to do with the time given to us. We have been given a time of war, and we decided to honor the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and obey him by staying where he called us to be in order to be lights for Him. Pray that our light will shine and continue to shine.
Blessings,
Milad