Dear Pastors, Churches and Friends,
December 1, 2017 (Oct. – Nov. ’17)

I hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving. They don’t celebrate that holiday here, but I was able to find a restaurant that served turkey and Mary & I went there to eat on Thanksgiviing day. It has been a good couple of months since our last printable prayer letter. We continue to have some small earthquakes but our building is built on bedrock so it is pretty stable when there in minimal activity. In the 30 days there has been 76 earthquakes, many in the mid 4s on the Richter Scale. Schools here just reopened after a couple months. The majority of them were poorly built to begin with and many others suffered structual damage. The volcano Popocatepetl is less than 50 miles southeast of us and recently starting having violent erruptions.

Church has gone well with souls saved and baptized since we last wrote. We still have new first-time visitors regularly. Our church continues to grow. Not only am I making two trips in our 15-passenger van to pick up people for church, but we also had to divide our adult Sunday school into two classes, as well as the same for the kid’s class. We made a quick trip the United States in October for our son Joseph’s wedding. Joseph is a youth pastor and married Joanna Carr, where her dad pastors Faith Baptist Church in Gulfport, MS, which is minutes from the Gulf of Mexico. The violent forces of nature seem to follow us as Hurricane Nate made a direct hit the night of the wedding. It was nice seeing our families again. Both our daughter Hannah & our other son Stephen were present though Stephen was very sick with mono. While in the U.S. for the week or so we got to celebrate birthdays for Stephen, our granddaughter Jenna and Mary’s dad. Jospeh & Joanna spent a few days in Cancun for their honeymoon. They had a rental car as part of the hotel/flight package, and Joseph was reminded of his “fond memories” of his time in Mexico with us as he was pulled over by police twice in two days for no real reason but that they wanted to be paid off to let him go. Joseph and Joanna plan to return to California next Fall for Joseph to obtain his Master’s Degree in Bible.

Thanks to several churches and Christian families, I was able to pay off the $3,500 that my insurance didn’t cover for my surgeries in Mexico. Pray for our health and also our safety. We still hear gun battles almost daily, day and night. Last month a lady from our church called me and asked if I could take her to help her husband as there had been a murder that night where he works. She sent her son-in-law ahead of us. When he arrived on the scene, his life was threatened and then he disappeared & hasn’t been seen since. He is presumed to be dead. Also, his wife just had a baby the week before. We had a few men in our church assualted and robbed on separate occasions the last two months using public transportation. Halloween, which is a witch holiday here, lasts several days and they celebrate the day of the dead, all saints day & all souls days. The streets were full of crazy people and so are the cemeteries, day and night. We witnessed and pass out thousands of tracts during Halloween.

We arrived safely on the Texas border Monday. We are here for a couple medical appointments but also picked up cases of tracts & Bibles, puppets, and LOTS of clothes to donate to the poor in Mexico City. We return to Mexico City tomorrow morning. Thank you so very much for your prayers, support, help, encouragements, calls, text, emails, etc. You have no idea the blessing you are to us and the help you are to the people of Mexico City because of your involvment in world-wide missions. Thanks for everything! We pray for you all, regularly. We are “…your servants for Jesus’ sake.” (2 Cor. 4:5).

Bro. Mike Wallace & Family