By Martha Baldridge
It is Saturday afternoon, and Lawrence and I are in Brandon, Mississippi, just a few miles from Jackson. We drove all the way down on Thursday, just ahead of the snow which fell that night. It was 10 hours and 40 minutes of hard driving, almost non-stop.
We came here for the winter meeting of the Romanian American Mission. Little did we know that a dear friend of ours, who started this organization 15 years ago and and has been our leader since then, would pass away suddenly from a massive heart attack just before the meeting began. We met Bob and Gail almost fifty years ago and have been in close contact for all this time, know each other’s children and grandchildren; we have been on mission trips together, visited in each other’s homes.
Our plans had been to return home today, but this unexpected event is keeping us in this area for several more days, as Lawrence is to preach his funeral Monday afternoon in Flomaton, Alabama. Life is uncertain at best, and God has His own plans for each one of us. We will certainly miss Bob Jackson, but he left behind the witness of an incredible commitment to the Lord and the vision as well as a plan for sharing the love of God with Romania and other European countries.
Cold weather arrived here in the south about the same time we did, but the skies here in Mississippi have been perfectly clear. More snow is expected tonight and tomorrow morning in Knott County. On our way down we couldn’t help but remember our last trip south in April of last year when…
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