(Steve & Laura Reed have been very close friends with our parents for many, many years.) Hi Linda and Larry, Thank you for the service. It was a great tribute to your dad. I attached my last prayer letter. Most of it is about your dad. I hope you like it. In His Love Steve ___________________________________________________________ August 27, 2013 Dear Friends, Greetings from home. Saturday I went to the memorial service of a very good friend. Dale was turning 80 and his family had a big birthday party planned for him. He had a massive stroke four days before the party and never recovered. Dale had had incredible ministries throughout his life. In 1979 Dale and his wife, another couple, and Laura and I started a prayer meeting that met every Tuesday and Thursday at 6:00 am. Dale was faithful to Tuesdays and Thursdays until a few months ago when he was no longer able to come because of health reason. The prayer meeting continues every Tuesday and Thursday in our home. In 1979 Dale, his wife Barbara, and Laura and I sponsored a refugee family from Laos. We stayed in Sacramento for another six months before we headed to San Francisco. Dale and Barbara continued to serve and love the South East Asian refugees. God brought a people group called the Mien (tribal people from Laos) into their lives and they started teaching English and serving them in any way they could. What came out of their commitment to serve the least of these is incredible. The largest Mien church in the world came out of their ministry. Through the church the Mien Bible was completed. The church sends Christian leaders to Laos, North Viet Nam and South Central China on a regular basis to train Mien leaders. Dale remained a faithful servant of the Mien until his death. I learned several things from Dale. I shared a couple at the memorial service. First, was that Dale never worried about tomorrow. He was not a planner, he was a doer. As we made plans to help the refugees (the first refugee family in Sacramento from Laos) we just thought of ways we could serve them and be available. We had no goals and objectives. We did have hopes and dreams but we had no idea what God would do. God did more that we could have imagined. The leaders of the Mien church are major leaders in the Mien people worldwide. A culture of animism and Buddhism is being transformed. And it started and was carried through by God who gets the credit. I remember several years ago a well known mega pastor told me ten years after he had started the church, “We did not need the Holy Spirit; we did everything by the book.” Dale did nothing by the book and God permitted him to be part of His ministry. The second thing about Dale and his ministry is that he had to let the nationals control everything. Mien is a very difficult language and at the time we only knew of three people outside of their culture who spoke their language. Dale simply loved the people and served them. The third thing was that Dale always felt the most incredible privilege he had was to be accepted into the Mien culture. He realized his vocation was not being a contractor. He was a contractor to support his vocation: an ambassador of Christ. So many missionaries, pastors, and church leaders see the people they work with as privileged to have them. The privilege is not theirs but they act like the others are privileged to sit at their feet and learn the informational truth of the Gospel. In today’s Christian world most of us see our vocation as our career. This includes those in professional ministry and those who are not. God calls us to a vocation of advancing the Kingdom of God and everything else is secondary. Dale lived his vocation. Paul Harvey had a program called the rest of the story. The rest of the story is Dale’s name: Dale Love. God gave him a name and he lived up to it. I write this story because in the next four months I want to write what God has done with us over the past thirty five years. Like Dale, I am not a planner. We never really knew where God would take us. The one thing we tried to do was follow without worrying about tomorrow. We tried to follow a path not a plan. So every couple of weeks for the next four months I am going to write stories about what God has done through us…for we did this together. San Francisco, the two churches and the legal clinic would never have existed apart from your participation in our lives. Beyond Partnership had the incredible success because of the national leaders that God put in our path and you. As I come to my last four months there are so many feelings going around in my being. Some days I wake up with sadness as this huge stage of my life comes to an end. Some days I wake up with excitement for where God will take us on the next stage. I always wake up with thankfulness for the friends that God has given me and the privilege I have to live and work with the poor. There is so little I would change. I hope you enjoy the stories that I will share as much I will enjoy writing them. The health of Otto de La Cruz is not good. It has never been good but it seems to be worse. He contacted the dengue fever, which is horrible. As he was getting over that he got typhoid. Now his legs are swollen. Please be in prayer for his health. Many of you who know him personally know that he has given everything for the Gospel. I will officially end my formal relationship with Partnership the end of the year. If you are supporting me, please continue your support until the end of the year. If God leads you to give a onetime gift it would be greatly appreciated as I need some support for my last four months. I am still planning my farewell trip to Central America. It will be from October 13-23. There are several options on what countries you can visit. I attached the schedules and the cost. Please let me know if you are interested. The cutoff date is September 10th. Please be in pray to see if God would have you join me. It will be a great encouragement to the national church and me. Laura and I are working with several people in our community to start a legal clinic. With all the changes in immigration there will be a huge need for good legal help. Please pray for us as we develop this for our next stage of life. We pray you are resting in His grace and never forget the privilege that God has given us to be His ambassadors. In His Love, Steve Steve Reed 4745 15th Avenue Sacramento, CA 95810 Cell: 916-730-1710 Email: SteveGReed@aol.com Web: BeyondPartnership.org