Dear Friends and Supporters,
I want to extend our Easter Greetings to our friends around the World. We know many of you are suffering from the lack of food, no funding for education, and the inability to be united to family members during this time of year and Easter. Never lose hope! Jesus proved that on Easter Sunday when he rose from the tomb. None of us can imagine the hopelessness felt by his disciples following Jesus’s passion and death. None of them, despite his prediction, thought he meant he would literally rise from the tomb. None could imagine what he told was that he seriously would rise from the dead.
We visited St. Thomas’s martyrdom site and his tomb in the beautiful city of Chennai overlooking the Bay of Bengal in Tamil Nadu. Even Thomas, who walked, talked, and witnessed the many miracles that Jesus performed, could not believe Jesus’s disciples when they told him that they had seen the Lord. Indeed someone as close to Jesus as he had been would have seen Jesus himself. Thomas was incredulous, “…he said to them, ‘Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
Eight days later, when Thomas gathered with the disciples, Jesus came and stood among them. Jesus addressed Thomas, directly pulling his hand toward the wound in his side. “Put your finger here and see my hands, and put your hand and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.”
Thomas answered him, “My Lord and My God!”
Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you…” Anyone person’s efforts are not resolving all poverty. We must have faith that God wills us to help through his Grace and our compassionate Love for others.
We cannot respond to calls for help in the Third World without you. Please don’t think; others will help, perhaps next time. We need your support now, not later. Please do not wait for others to do it. God depends on you being the instrument of his Love.
You magnify God’s Love with your donation.
Happy Easter!
Dr. John Bickert,
CFTW President
