Swap Blog

Dear ITAM Board of Directors Member and Friends,

The following was sent to me by Billy on December 30th. This is a plea for us to get involved in serious prayer and fund raising for the situation in and around Indonesia. As you know, Billy, Jesse Simonian, and Hebert Rincon are on the ground doing relief work as you read this.
Let’s get our churches, businesses, families, and whoever God puts on you mind involved in this effort.
The need is beyond our comprehension physically and even greater spiritually.
This is a great opportunity to be “light” where there is much darkness. Let’s shine as we have been given the title “light of the world”. Let’s work quickly and vigorously.

Thank you in advance and to God be the Glory!

John Luethke

Send funds to ITAM, 7012 Ashley Court, Knoxville, TN 37921

Email Fron Indonesia Below
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The ITAM team is headed to Medan for the first steps of giving the 600 lbs of supplies and funds to partners. The team will assist in organizing relief agencies to coordinate together for most effective results. With the ITAM staff’s past efforts in Sudan we offer experience in situations like this. The team, while going and giving in the Island of Nias will be using many modes of transportation including air, ground, river and sea. We will be fasting while there, since their effort is only 19 days.
we will drink 1 pint of water per day and give their food and other water away. We will take multi-vitamins as we work day and night to help those in need.
ITAM is organizing a prayer vigil in the hardest hit areas to raise awareness of the hope and comfort found in a personal relationship with Christ. Pray for the ITAM team as we promote a personal relationship with Christ, the One who can offer true hope. Also pray that the demonstrations of love through the food, water, medication and support will communicate the love of Christ.

“I am personally asking for you to donate funds to ITAM as we reach out during this historic natural disaster. It is times like this that the family of God should truly sacrifice to make sure people receive help during their time of need. The world is responding, will Christians?”

Merry Christmas From Team Swap.

Remember the real reason for the season.

Christ is KING, He is alive, He is risen and we are saved by His grace.

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Team Swap is taking the Christmas weekend off from blogging we will be back to our keyboards early next week. Thank you for your prayers, support and encouragement over the last year.

Well it looks like the attack yesterday in Mosul was a suicide bomber. He had worked on the base for a few months, gathered info, and then carried out the bombing yesterday. This terrorist, yes we said terrorist, is just one more example of how badly some people fear freedom and free elections. Democracy will prevail in Iraq and the people of the nation will eventually find out what it means to be free, unfortunately there are a lot of people left that benefited from the previous dictator, yes Saddam was a dictrator, or that fear that a free Iraq will be a friend to the world, not a thorn in the side of the west. Amercians, and our government, must stay the course and show the Middle East that fear and terrorist attacks will not stop the wheels of a brigther future.

CTV Link

For those that are waiting for the debute of the newest Team Swap maintained site, well we are close to releasing our newest site on the world. The official lauch date is January 1, 2005, but if anyone wants to look at the current state (which is changing daily and sometimes hourly) then follow the following link -

Second Baptist Knoxville

Be sure to check on the 180 site under the link’s section as it is the next major project Team Swap will be tackling.

Sorry for the gap in blogging - there has been several illnesses, injuries and sicknesses around Team Swap and we are just now getting back up to speed.

Excerpt from the Sunday Times regarding Dr. Flew -

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He is still not a Christian and dismisses the conventional forms of divinity as “the monstrous oriental despots of the religions of Christianity and Islam”. He also stands by his rejection of an afterlife.

Instead, he believes that new scientific discoveries have revealed the existence of an organising intelligence. Investigation of DNA, he said, “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved”.

Darwin’s theory of evolution does not explain the origin and development of life to Flew’s satisfaction. “I have been persuaded that it is simply out of the question that the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then developed into an extraordinarily complicated creature,” he said.

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Well for Dr. Flew’s own personal state TEAM SWAP hopes that he completes his transistion from avoyed atheist to Christian quickly because like the rest of us - he has no promise of tommorrow - and his current state of conditional faith and limited belief does not place Christ on the cross for Dr. Flew’s sin and only that will bring on to a relationship with Christ which leads to heaven. Belief in God is not enough, it is acceptance of Christ on the cross paying for our sins that must be meet for us to enter heaven. Team Swap pray’s that Dr Flew completes his transformation quickly before he finds out that his belief in no afterlife is wrong, like he has recently accepted about his past views of Evolution. Hopefully this will also reduce the belief by many that evolution is fact not theory.

UK Telegraph Article

The Sunday Times Article

The Christian Post

ABC News

Well Canada seems to be on the glide path to approve Gay marraige sometime
in 2005. This will put additional pressure on the US to accept / embrace
Gay marriage, instead of the trend toward legalized civil unions.

Fundementally though the issue is not one of law. Both hetrosexual and
homosexual couples can and do live togather outside of marriage throughout
the US. Many times the results of these relationships are children outside
of marriage. Many of these relationships have legal means / ways of
providing all the access and issues that married couples have.

Fundementally the issue is one of faith and one of beliefs. Most would
agree that God is against divorce in most, if not all, cases. Most would
also agree that God hates divorce, yet there has been a acceptance of it
within the body of Christ. In the past the Bible was used to condemn
interrational marriage (which is now common and accepted within most
churches), slavery (which all churches have rejected now), spouse domination
(which has been greatly condemend within the body now), but all of those are
different. To accept the previous list it took Chrisians seeing the error
in their ways and seeing people as God created them, as equal, and unique.
The acceptance of gay marraige requires the step to say that God’s unique
design was wrong, that some how His decsion to make male and female was
flawed, and that in some cases He creates people that desire something
outside of the order He created.

Gay marraige does not change the marriages of those that take their marriage
covenent seriously any more then divorce does, what it does do though is
make the statement that God makes mistakes and flaws and errors and that His
design is not perfect. That leads to a fundemental question of if God even
exisist, because if He is flawed and His creation is imperfect He is not
God.

So, the question of gay marriage really is not about if it affects you, it
is how it affects society and those that affects all in society.

You have received this ABCNEWS.com mail from:

Well NASA is about to be in the business of having to find a new leader it looks like. O’Keefe sounds like a good fit for LSU and NASA needs to find some vision and direction if they want to be a strong force in the coming years. To do that they need a leader that wants to be there. O’Keefe has done a fine job managing NASA, but it seems like he is consistently frustrated by the lack of ability to change and act. NASA and O’keefe need to part ways, hopefully they will both come out ahead in the end.

NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe to Resign
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=324464