Happy New Year!

Greetings from the Morehouses!

We deeply appreciate all your support and look forward
to serving together with you in the coming year.

Click here to read our holiday letter.

Santa vs. God?

OK, Virginia, There's No Santa Claus.
But There Is God

My 8-year-old son, Caleb, puts his hand on my shoulder; he wears an expression that shows he wants to have a man-to-man talk. "Dad," he says, "I know there's no Santa Claus." He rattles off his indictments, starting with the pure physics of the enterprise. There's no way one guy can visit every house in a single night. And how does he get into houses with no chimneys? Then there's the matter of zoology – not a single nature book on our shelves mentions flying reindeer. Perhaps most important for an 8-year-old, there's the weight of public opinion – none of Caleb's friends believe in Santa any more. He leans close, his voice taking that tone of worldliness that is at once endearing and saddening to a parent. "He isn't real, is he?"

Perhaps a more responsible parent would confess, but I hesitate. For this I blame G.K. Chesterton, whose treatise "Orthodoxy" had its 100th anniversary this year.

Click here to read Tony Woodlief's essay in today's Wall Street Journal.

News from Jerusalem

BT writes from Jerusalem:

This has been another year of change. As I was writing my last letter I did not know what would happen at the end of August. When Dr. Mousa told me he had to close his practice in Tiberias it meant that I would have no clinic or dentist to provide a dental program for the needy.

After helping many hundreds of the Lebanese with extensive dental care I expected at some time to gradually phase out the service, but not to suddenly stop with so little notice. The day I got the news I began to inform our patients, one of whom was a believer who had been referred by the pastor of a local fellowship. She thought the service was too important to lose and asked her pastor if he could help. To make a long story short, I discussed the project at length with the pastor and we agreed, with an initial six month commitment, to partner to support the service thus making it available to even more needy people referred by the fellowship as well as the Lebanese. This plan allowed Dr. Mousa to keep the clinic and continue working with us.

It is a solution I neither initiated nor thought possible so I can only thank God for it. As I reflect over the past 25 years of my ministry I can clearly see the Lord’s hand enabling and guiding me, even through circumstances that I could not anticipate and could not understand. Life is full of uncertainty, but we have confidence in the Lord.

Click here to read B's 2008 Holiday newsletter.

Christmas Caroling!

Christmas Caroling in the Park

Join us on Tuesday, December 16th from 7:00-8:00 pm
at the corner of Arnett and Wellington.

All are welcome! Bring flashlights or candles. Hot cocoa provided.

Questions? Call Susan at 436-1628.

Open House a Success!

This morning we had a great turnout of enthusiastic visitors and generous supporters at our Fundraising Open House. Our heartfelt thanks go out to all the staff and volunteers who helped make our event such a success and to our guests for taking precious time during the holiday season to come out and offer your support. We appreciate your involvement and are looking forward to working more closely with all of you in the future as we seek to improve the quality of life of all in our neighborhood.

God bless you!

A thought experiment

Here's an excerpt from a thought-provoking article about health care disparities, written by Dr. Douglas Kamerow (graduate of Rochester's Family Medicine Program) and published in a recent issue of the British Medical Journal, that would be of interest to anyone who heard Dr. Morehouse's talk at the His Branches Open House earlier today:

Our perfectly designed US healthcare system

The interregnum between a presidential election and the inauguration is a time of feverish activity, in which the president elect and his staff decide who will help them govern and what they will try to do first. The press and pundits speculate breathlessly on who will be appointed and what they will do first. As I write this, for example, we have just learnt that the new administration’s secretary of health and human services is likely to be a respected former US senator, Tom Daschle. He has written a book about healthcare reform, which is likely to be his assignment when he starts in January.

I’ve been musing about the United States and how perfectly designed our current healthcare system is. Perfectly designed, of course, as every system is, to achieve exactly the results it gets, as quality improvement guru Don Berwick famously said. In its own way, it is really rather remarkable. Here’s a thought experiment to illustrate what I mean.

Click here to read the whole article.