It took us some time to get this done, but here it is finally! Click on

the player below to listen to the Truth for our Time interview with Tamara Scott on Iowa's Praise 940am.

Short note today; BCP will be on the air on WayFM on Tuesday 12/2. We

expect to be on at 8:30am EST and we should be on the air for 10 minutes in 22 States! If you get a chance give us a listen. If you're in South Florida you can

listen on 88.1FM. If not, you can always catch us on your local station or you can listen online at:

href="http://wayf.wayfm.com">http://wayf.wayfm.com

By the way, we finally have the link to the praise 940am interview. We still need to do a little

work before posting it so please bear with us.

It’s almost hard to believe, but the BCP 2008 team leaves for Bethlehem

in less than two weeks!! Last time we wrote, we said there would be some big news…There is, and we’ll get to it in just a little bit.

First, as of

today, we’ve raised enough money to deliver gifts for 235+ children! Praise God! We cannot thank all of you enough for your faithfulness to give and for your

prayers and encouragement. Gifts would not be going to Bethlehem this year were it not for your response to God’s prompting, and we are grateful to Him for you.

Any additional funds we raise at this point will help us expand our outreach to far more children than we had anticipated. There are many locations with children who

have unmet needs and would love to receive gifts.

Secondly, we will be wrapping gifts for donation at the Weston Town Center from 1:00- 8:00 p.m. on

Friday, November 28th and Saturday, November 29th and need 6 volunteers each day. The first shift will wrap gifts from 1:00-4:30 p.m. and the second shift will do so

from 4:30- 8:00 p.m. If you are able to volunteer for one or both days, please

href="http://bethlehemchristmasproject.info/index.php?option=com_contact&task=view&contact_id=1&Itemid=31">contact us as soon as possible and indicate which day/s

and shift/s you could serve.

Now, for the big news we’ve promised. For several months now, we have been working with

href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/December/">Christianity Today (CT) on an article about BCP. Today, we received a copy of the December 2008

edition and are very excited to tell you that BCP is on the cover! We’re not the cover story, but the title of the article about BCP is listed on the cover with a

page number reference. We have been told CT will post the article on their website in another week or two. So, if you subscribe to CT, keep an eye out for the

December edition. If not, we’ll send out the link once the article is available.

In other news, we still need to upload the mp3 for the radio interview

from November 12th. We’ll be uploading tomorrow evening and will send out a short note when it’s up.

Remember, we will blog daily during the project

and update our twitter page as we move from location to location. Ali will also be sending status updates on facebook. If

you haven’t followed us on twitter yet, connect with us there for real-time updates.

Finally, if you’ve been

thinking about helping the project this year but haven’t gotten to it yet, you can still help by visiting our

href="http://bethlehemchristmasproject.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=34">donate page.

Stay tuned- the best is yet to

come!

We have some big news to announce in the next couple of weeks so keep

checking up on the blog. We can’t say what it is quite yet so just bear with us for now. We promise it will be good news that’s worth the wait.

For

now we have a quick note for you. On Wednesday the 12th at 12:30pm EST (11:30am CST), Ali Elhajj and Rod Reding will be live on Iowa’s Praise 940AM with Tamara

Scott. The name of the show is “Truth for our Times”. You can listen live at praise940.com

Many thanks to those of

you who have either committed to supporting us this year or have already supported us with your giving. Please remember to pray for the BCP 2008 team while we’re

in Bethlehem from December 5th through the 14th. We’ll be sending out specific prayer requests this weekend.

Hope you can tune in to Wednesday's show;

if not, we’ll post the recording once we have it.

We have our video up on GodTube! Now, our goal is to get it on the “Most

Viewed” page. To do that, we need at least 100 people to watch it. Please help us by clicking

href="http://www.godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=d7975b2af77610a662b8">here to watch the video.

Hello all, this is Ali writing you a little story about being humbled.

Yesterday, I uploaded our new video to YouTube and sent you an email update. Like everyone at BCP, I was very happy and excited to have the video finished and up for

viewing. Well, looks like I was a little too excited about getting it out.

Not too long after writing the blog, a couple of emails came in about some

misspelled words in my entry. Every once in a while a little event comes along to humble a person. A poor grammar blog did it for me!

Apologies to you

all! I was trying to get the blog out to you early in the morning and, in my excitement, I didn’t comb through the entry as well as I should have. I know, it’s

not the end of the world, but I feel it’s important you know we did catch it.

More importantly, I buried the evidence by fixing the blog entry on the

site, so you’ll just have to look through your email and find the missing/incorrect words. :)

In other news, I’ve been trying to upload the video to

GodTube for the last couple of days but have had no success, as there seems to be a problem with GodTube’s uploader. It will be up there eventually. I’m also

hoping GodTube will give us a “Ministry” page.

By the way, instead of sending folks to YouTube when the video link is clicked, we created a page on

our website. You can now see the video here. Please use this new

link when forwarding it to your friends.

Please continue to pray for the project. This is a very hectic time of the year for us, and we very much need

your prayer support. Pray specifically that God will provide the funds necessary for us, and please prayerfully consider supporting us once more.

We’re

getting close to Christmas, and we can’t wait to see what God has in store!

Blessings and good spelling to you all,
Ali

Our DVD is now Available
We’re thrilled to announce the

public release of our film! As you know, we have had many setbacks (from losing all the footage due to equipment failure after having our hard drive examined by

Israeli security to waiting on stock footage to be released to us for public broadcast.) After many months, we’re happy to have the film complete so we can share

our experience in Bethlehem with you.

The video is available now on YouTube. You can see it here.

We pray you will forward it on to your friends and family to help us tell our story.

Our hope is to show the film in as many churches and bible study

classes as possible. Please contact us if you’d

like to help us show the film in your church. Our goal is for people to catch the vision and join us in Bethlehem, or to help us make gift delivery possible by

contributing to the project. Again, if you think you can help show the film in your church or bible study, please

href="http://bethlehemchristmasproject.info/index.php?option=com_contact&task=view&contact_id=1&Itemid=31">contact us.

Finally, those of you who

supported us last year have received copies of the DVD. If you donated last year, please give USPS some time to deliver the DVD to you. If you do not receive it by

next week, please let us know so we can send you a copy.

BCP Family Picnic
Mark your calendars, because we’ll be having a picnic on November

22nd at TY park in Hollywood, FL! Some very nice folks have donated burgers and chicken to us, and we also have someone who has volunteered their time to run

organized games for the kids.

We’ll be having a bounce house and some prizes, so be sure to come and have a good time with us and meet some of the

other folks who have made the project possible

We’re asking folks to donate $10 per adult (ages 10&up) and $5 per child (2-9). You can

href="http://bethlehemchristmasproject.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=43">sign-up online here. Please sign-up ahead of time so we can estimate

the amount of food we’ll need.

All the funds raised will go to purchasing Christmas gifts.

More information and other events can be found on

our events page.

BCP 2008

Team
Last but not least, we are getting ready to go back to Bethlehem in December. We’ll be in Bethlehem from December 6th through the 13th.

We

have a team of 13 people from 3 States. We’re very excited to see what God will be doing this year. We pray you will support us again with your prayers and

giving. We can’t do this project without you.

Please pray for our safety and for God’s will to be done during the project. We’ll be blogging daily

and uploading pictures, so be sure to check your email and our website. Ali will also be updating his facebook profile with updates along the way (when possible).

We’ll also be updating Twitter. Here’s the link to our twitter page.

The best is yet to come!

Two items to report on today: BCP's 2008 Dates and our new

website.

Let's start with the BCP's 2008 dates. It is official, we will be in Bethlehem this year from December 5th through the 14th! If you have been

praying about joining us this year, those are the dates to pray about! If you're thinking of being a part of the team now is the time to contact us and let us know

you're interested.

Now, for the new site! We've been working on this for a while and we're proud to have the new look-and-feel

completed.

Beyond just cosmetics, we also added a section which includes information about our Middle East Study Group as well as a section for Prayer

Requests.

We also made available some of the audio from media interviews directly on the website's homepage. You'll also be able to find a link to our

facebook page and links to the seven most recent blog entries right on the homepage.

Take a look and let us know what you think.

In other news,

work on the film started again this week. More on this soon. Really, there is a film in the works and it will be available before long! Really…

Hello everyone, we have lots of new faces signed up to the blog and quite a

bit has been happening in the last two months.

First for some great news: we are now an official 501(c)(3) non-profit organization! The lawyer who helped

us with the process said: “This is nothing short of a miracle, both the speed at which this occurred and the relative ease of obtaining it…” We are very happy

to be an official non-profit and to have the IRS requirements process behind us. We too were amazed with how quickly we were able to receive non-profit status.

Thanks be to God and to all of you who have been praying for us.

Beyond the IRS paperwork, most of our time and energy has been about producing the film

and presenting it to potential broadcasters. The finished piece is less than 7-minutes long, but each minute has had hours, and hours, of work behind

it.

In March we attended the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville and showed early versions of the movie to potential broadcasters from

around the world (everywhere from Australia, the UK, Romania, the Middle East, South Africa, the Netherlands and on and on.) We have quite a bit of interest from

broadcasters and are looking forward to wrapping up all the loose ends on the film project and seeing it before audiences.

When will the film be ready, you

ask? All the footage is complete, the music is finished and all that remains is finishing up the credits, working on titling and subtitles, audio and color

correction, creating the DVD menu, packaging the film, getting DVDs produced and mailed, and putting and the video up on YouTube. Just a few loose ends…more or

less…please pray for this process to go smoothly.

Why is this taking so long you may wonder? In the last

href="http://bethlehemchristmasproject.info/index.php?option=com_jd-wp&Itemid=38&p=85">entry we wrote about the troubles we had with Israeli security

disassembling hard drives, losing footage and having to send the drives to data recovery.

After receiving the footage and going through many edits and

finalizing the voice-overs, one item remained: securing the rights to some stock footage we utilized. Those of you who have had the chance to see early versions of

the film know we have some footage showing the cycle of violence in the region. Using that footage requires purchasing the rights, but before we could do that we

needed to research where the footage came from and then negotiate pricing. This alone took several weeks but fortunately, we now have the necessary rights (thanks to

a grant we received specifically for the film project).

Once we secured the rights we then shipped the video files from the UK to Iowa (the hard drive

arrived in Iowa today!) and now we are waiting to start the final phase of post-production.

The year will accelerate from here in as we gear up for heading

to Bethlehem in December. It’s almost unbelievable that 6 months have passed since the team returned from Bethlehem and it’s almost unbelievable that we have

just about 7 months to go before returning.

We will soon be publishing the dates for BCP 2008. Be sure to

href="http://bethlehemchristmasproject.info/index.php?option=com_contact&task=view&contact_id=1&Itemid=31">contact us if you’re thinking of joining us this

year.

Finally, we have a need for some web development work. If you have the necessary skills and are willing to dedicate 2 hours per night for

two-to-three weeks, please drop us a line.

Be blessed and keep us in your prayers…The best is yet to come.

A while back we had written that the film about the project would be ready

by the end of January. It’s almost March (happy leap year!), and so you must be wondering what happened…Where’s the film? Let us explain.

Back in

December after the completion of the project Basil (the film’s director) stored all the footage on two identical hard drives. The drives were mirror images of one

another -each containing a full copy of the footage. With two copies, we reasoned, no data would be lost in case something happened. We thought were safe and had

the necessary precautions in place; but, we were wrong.

On the way out of Ben Gurion airport Israeli security asked to examine one of the drives. Not

both of them, just one…for security… Israel has the most sophisticated security imaging systems in the world, but having the drive run through it was not

sufficient. Airport security took the drive for 40 minutes.

Eventually, Basil got the drive back and got on the plane. Once he returned to London he

plugged the drive in and discovered all the data was lost! We don’t know what happened, and we aren’t going to speculate and blame it on some malicious action by

Israeli security. Whatever happened, the drive was gone for 40 minutes and when we got it back the footage wasn’t there.

Fortunately, we still had an

intact second drive…Basil got the bad drive reformatted (it was physically fine, just inaccessible) and was ready to copy the data over. Here’s where things went

horribly wrong. The drives, it seems, were identical (the same make and model from a well-known manufacturer), but their power supplies were not.

We

received this email from Basil on the day he attempted the copy: “I was supposed to export and upload a roughcut version for you, but today my external hard drive

did something strange, it was smoking and smelled funny.” “Smoking and smelled funny” are not words one wants to hear when it comes to electronics!

Apparently, the power supplies looked identical but their electrical specifications were different. In short, the drive was fried and we were facing the possibility

of no film…

We prayed and prayed and sent the burnt drive that hadn’t been reformatted to a data recover service. Then we waited…and prayed…and

prayed. At the end of January we received an email from the recovery service telling us that we had all the data! Thank God!

We waited to get the drive

back and have been working on the film ever since. We’re on our 9th or so roughcut at this point and we expect to be done sometime next week. (well, sort

of…We’re going to do some more post production work on sound and color in April, but we’ll have the video up on YouTube before then).

The film,

we’re happy to say, follows the spirit of the project in that we have Israelis, Americans and Palestinians (on 3 continents) working on it. We’re very excited

about where we are in editing now and can’t wait to get it out to you. Our goal is to show it in every church in America to compel people to come with us and to be

engaged in supporting reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.

Bear with us, we’ll be uploading the film soon. It’s been a rollercoaster for

us.