Fixing our house

A good friend just did us the favor of reminding us that we haven’t updated you all since Christmas. As you’ll see, February was a rather hectic month for us.

We’re writing you from a room in an extended-stay hotel in Cedar Park, a 15-min. drive from our house in Leander. The house is currently sitting empty, with most of the contents in a couple of storage pods in the driveway. We had to move out so the flooring can be replaced.

Let me back it up a little to give you some background… Just when we thought all the damage from the plumbing leak in the floor slab had been repaired and life was back to normal, our tile floor in the living room “tented” or popped up in the middle as if there were a bubble of water under it.

The insurance company sent out a structural engineer to determine whether this issue was related to the leak in the pipe in the concrete slab under our living room. After a few weeks they said they were denying coverage… (Oh no!!!)  But just minutes later, the adjuster called me back and said he must have misread the engineer’s report the first time and he changed his mind (Yay!!! Thank you, Lord!).

He decided they should re-tile the entire house! We would have been happy with a one-room repair, but that’s not how they do it.

They’re not only hiring someone to give us a new floor, but they sent a moving crew to pack our stuff into a couple of pods and cover the windows and cabinets in plastic. And they’ve put us up in this extended-stay hotel.

So, we’ll be in this room for awhile. A couple of card tables are serving as desks for the two of us. As you can imagine, this isn’t an ideal situation for living and working, but we can’t complain. It really is a minor inconvenience compared to the conditions under which many of our fellow missionaries are serving God around the world.

Family health updates:

• Eida’s mom (Ruth) is no longer in skilled nursing. She’s back living in their independent living apartment and doing better, for which we thank the Lord. 
   
• On February 21, however, Eida’s 92-year-old dad, Vern, had a very scary episode. He suddenly couldn’t type on his computer and was even having trouble standing and walking, so they called the paramedics and took him to the hospital. It turned out that he had a couple of subdural hematomas which were causing stroke-like symptoms. This was probably caused by a fall he had taken back in November.
  
  The operation on his brain went very well. Eida’s brother, Lou, flew out from New Jersey to help their folks out. It was a trying experience, but Dad is doing much better now. They are pretty much back to their normal routine and Lou has returned home.
   
• Steve’s dad (Glenn) had knee-replacement surgery February 26th. The surgery went well and he’s been doing his post-op therapy exercises with the help of Steve’s sister, Vicki, who flew out to help. His hope was that he might be able to walk again without the aid of a walker; it will take time and a lot of hard work to reach that goal.

SLR ministry updates:

• I translated a paper on “Inclusivism Redemption by Jesus Incognito,” a very interesting subject.
   
• I’ve also been working on materials for our Literacy Consultant Team. These folks travel around the world helping church-planting teams create literacy programs in tribal communities, training literacy consultants in the process.
  
  Our job is to translate their resources into Spanish – recently, it’s been mostly training materials for their literacy workshops.
  
  The workshops are amazing! Church-planting teams come to the workshop location and bring a few native speakers of the ethnic language with them. Within two or three weeks, with the help of the Literacy Starter software developed by Ethnos360 personnel (and translated by our team), they can put together a whole Literacy program with lesson plans, syllable charts and flash cards.
  
  Several more Literacy documents are on my “pending work” list marked “High Priority.”
   
• Of course, I always have plenty of day-to-day tasks to deal with, like answering inquiries to our espanol.Ethnos360.org website, following up on fundraising projects, handling inquiries for Spanish-language resource materials, supporting our Colombian brother, Israel, who  translates the Ethnos360 email prayer bulletin and website articles into Spanish every day, etc.. And new opportunities to serve pop into my email inbox daily. 
   
• Item of praise! — In January, Eida’s computer died – it had been running very slow but suddenly it refused to boot up at all! But praise God that a good friend from our small group at church was able to recover the contents of her hard drive and copy them to a solid state drive, restoring her machine to working order. And it runs fast now! Our brother wouldn’t take a dime for his labor or for the new drive. May God bless him and his family.
   
• Speaking of computers, here’s a big prayer request:  We just received this message from the computer support desk of the Ethnos360 home office: “Please take steps now to upgrade your Win 7 PC to Win 10. Win 7 will stop receiving security patches in January 2020 and we will begin to block all access to information for Win 7 users at that time.”
  
  Our old Dell 6520 and 6420 laptops run on Windows 7. Dell says they won’t provide drivers or support for these models if you upgrade them to the Windows 10 operating system. So it looks like we’re going to need newer laptops by the end of the year; in the past we’ve bought used or refurbished through the mission. Pray for good deals and provision to pay for them.

Thank you all so much for partnering with us so faithfully and upholding us in prayer!

Steve & Eida Irwin

Ethnos360 Spanish Language Resources
Cell: 408-515-1721
1009 Lantana Ct., Leander TX 78641

PRAYER REQUESTS FOR FELLOW MISSIONARIES:
Great news about Mark Cain! The non-Hodgkins lymphoma in his body responded amazingly well to the chemo and he is actually in remission! We are told that only 5% of patients respond this well to treatment. He’s really enjoying time with his family and the opportunity to finish up the work on the revision of the Guahibo language Scriptures. Thank you for praying for him. 

About the Cains’ teammate, Consuelo, we have no new information except that she continues to be paralyzed from cancer and is on strong pain meds to alleviate her suffering. Please pray for her. She is ready for the Lord to take her Home.