An Urgent Prayer Need

Good Morning,

In the past few years Bethany and I have communicated about the condition of her dad’s heath. He’s struggled with dementia and Alzheimer’s like symptoms and has been living in a nursing home environment since December of 2006. During the last two months in particular, his struggle with this has greatly increased and his symptoms have been increased and more severe, so that during the last 2 weeks, he’s needed to be temporarily moved to a facility better equipped to deal with his condition as well as to be able to significantly adjust his current medications. In the mean time, as his current diagnosis has been evaluated and then re-evaluated and new diagnosis’ have been suggested, running from something called ‘Pick’s Disease’ to Alzheimer’s with Schizophrenia. This is all resulting in Dad’s current nursing home communicating that they’re not setup to handle and care for a patient with Dad’s symptoms and he’ll need to be moved, which will be a big task.

Bethany, especially seeing this happen so quickly is sensing a personal need to go down and spend some time with her mom and dad. Not because she expects to be any big help, but for her own personal well-being, she needs to see her dad and be able to also see her mom and at the least, be able to see some of the potential places that her dad may be moved too. The emotional weight of this situation on her, being as removed from the situation is much heavier than we anticipated it would be.

The challenge we face is that with Bethany’s progressing pregnancy, if she didn’t go down in the next two weeks or so and due to other non-movable plans, she wouldn’t be able to get down and see her Dad until late February of 2010 at the earliest. As we’ve prayed and sought the Lord’s guidance in this, we sense that this would be a good thing.

Another challenge we face is the cost of a ‘semi-last minute’ flight to Springfield, MO for her and Owen (Jack would stay here with me, and I would continue to minister here at New Tribes). Because of the instability in our financial support we haven’t been able to save for these kinds of travel expenses. Bethany is pricing tickets for a departure next week and we don’t yet have a final cost, but we anticipate it to be around $600-800 for the two of them. We have the ability to comfortably use some savings for roughly $300 of this, but not the entire amount.

We covet your support in this issue that we face; for confirmation of this being a wise course of action to pursue and if so, for the provision for this trip. Would you take this need before the Lord for us? Thank you for faithfully standing with us in this journey of partnering with our God!

Joel