The Flooded Midwest

Hey everyone,

Greetings from Illinois.

We are currently in Belleville, just across the river from St. Louis.

Many of you have heard about all the flooding in the Midwest, and we have been affected by some of it.

Last Saturday, we drove from Northern Indiana to Terre Haute. It was on the day they had a bunch of rain. Interstate 70 was shut down and what was supposed to be a 3 1/2 hour drive for us turned into a 7 1/2 hour drive. The last forty miles or so took us four hours! To make matters worse, our A/C on the bus is out right now and it was an extremely hot day. Now, if we are moving at a good pace on the interstate or whatever, there is at least a little bit of air moving through the bus. But that last four hours, there was no air movement at all. It was pretty miserable, to say the least. But we made it.

We were scheduled to perform in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, next week, but had to cancel that concert because of the flooding there. Sounds like it's pretty bad there. Five hundred city blocks were under water, according to the news reports that I read.

Another subject... a couple of weeks ago, on Memorial Day weekend, we had a big fundraiser softball tournament in Lancaster, PA, my home area. The action started on a Friday afternoon around 1:00 and there were games until 10:00 that night. Saturday morning, they were back at it around 8:00 and the tournament ended around 9:00 that night. There were eighteen teams from four different states. It was a a lot of fun. I even got to play a couple of games with a team from Ohio who needed a fill-in player. I went 3 for 5 with two doubles! Not bad for not having played for almost a year and not much at all for the past three years. Well, so much for my bragging. All day long on both days, we had concession stands set up with hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, pig roast sandwiches, and all kinds of other stuff. Then, on Sunday morning, the choir did a concert at a construction company's shop and the choir's Indian leaders cooked up a big Indian meal. That was still all part of the fundraiser. It was a great weekend. All of the proceeds went to famine relief in Northeast India. The tournament and related events brought in $17,000!

That following week, we performed at local fire hall there in Lancaster, and in four concerts raised another $10,000 for famine relief!

Since then we have been working our way west through Ohio, Indiana, and now Illinois.

Keep praying for us.

Michael