Praise and prayer

Praise God!

First of all, we want to share a fantastic answer to prayer with you!

Shortly after our last news/prayer letter went out, we got a call from a dear family in our support team. They had some funds set aside to give to God’s work and wanted to contribute $25,000 to the project of translating Dr. Deibler’s book “A Translation for Translators” into Spanish.

PRAISE GOD WITH US for this amazing and totally unexpected provision!!! I’d love to tell you the details of the story, but out of respect for their privacy, that will have to wait till heaven.

Consuelo Jiménez Update

If your memory is better than mine, you may recall when we told you back in early 2015 about one of our single Colombian coworkers, Consuelo Jiménez,* who had contracted cancer. She worked with the Guahibo tribal people in their language, ministering primarily to women and children. She also taught some modules in our national missionary training center in Fusa. [*Pictured above]

Her cancer proved to be very aggressive, spreading throughout her body, causing a lot of pain and paralyzing her from the chest down. As you might imagine, she has sometimes prayed that God would just take her Home, yet for some reason, He has chosen not to do so. Generous fellow believers have made it possible for her to have a day nurse come to her home, but her home situation is not conducive to healing.

We just received this report on Friday:

   “Consuelo was in the hospital for a month and has very resistant infection. It wasn’t going away so she went home…  
   “Her cancer is spreading but she really doesn’t want to know about it, though she is losing some mobility in her arms and has pain in them; she wonders if it has metastasized there as well.
   “She doesn’t want to think about her cancer, but rather good things. She’s teaching a couple of friends the Firm Foundations Bible lessons — still being used of the Lord!
   “She’d like to move to an apartment with her sister Cecilia where she would be more comfortable, but time will tell if that will become reality. Pray for God’s will to be done… Pray that they could sell [the apartment she owns in another city] soon — she could use the money.
   “She was in good spirits today, happy and looked good, according to Nancy [her ministry teammate]. She wants to live one day at a time, think positively and go out.
   “God reminds her that her body will be transformed and she’ll have no more pain so this encourages her.
   “Thank you all for your love and prayers for our dear sister in the Lord.”

Further adventures of home ownership

Just to update you, the floor tile replacement we mentioned in our last letter was covered under warranty, for which we are grateful to God and to the flooring company.

Since then, a new challenge has presented itself. It started when we noticed that our baseboards were pulling away from the wall. Then we discovered a pool of water in the AC return space under our furnace.

The source of this water was a mystery till a plumber cut three holes in our walls to discover water bubbling up from alongside a 3/4″ copper pipe emerging from the concrete slab on which our house is built. So we have what they call a slab leak.

The plumber painted a pretty bleak (and expensive) picture of possibly needing to reroute all the plumbing through the attic, but we’re hoping someone can detect the break point in the pipe itself and cut a hole in the concrete and fix it like was done for us in El Paso.

Please pray with us that God will lead us through the resolution of this problem, using our home warranty and homeowners’ insurance and some honest plumbers to keep the cost as low as possible. In the meanwhile, we’re being resourceful, remembering our experience in Cumaral, Colombia, where we lived without running water for over a year.

Sometimes it seems that we’re in over our heads… and we probably are! But God reminds us of how He’s seen us through so many other times we’ve been in situations far beyond what we could handle. You all have had a huge part in making that happen, so we THANK GOD FOR YOU! And we trust the Lord to take care of us as He always has. 

Your fellow servants,

Steve & Eida Irwin

Ethnos360 Spanish Language Resources
Cell: 408-515-1721