2007 June » Jarretts Ministry

Dear Friends and Family:

I wanted to give a brief update on Marty and some other things of concern for our ministry. Thanks so much for your prayers and support. We are continually praising God for what He is doing.

Tomorrow, Friday morning at 8:30, Marty has an appointment with a neurologist, Dr. Greg French, to discuss her neuropathy problem. Since the Taxol chemotherapy, she has had numbness in her hands and feet as well as constant pain in her legs. She is also frequently very cold and occasionally very warm; the latter is probably an effect of the Femara treatment which causes hot flashes. We have managed the pain fairly well with the narcotic pain patches, but I know there are other medications, such as Tegretol or Dilantin, that are sometimes used to treat neuropathy; I asked Dr. Lee about it, and he recommended this consultation. Please pray for wisdom for Dr. French.

Marty continues to regain strength and does more around the house each day; occasionally she feels too bad to do anything because of flu-like symptoms, but this seems to be related to the pain more than anything else; if we add a pain patch, she usually regains some energy. The requirement for pain patches seems to fluctuate making it difficult to stay with a constant dosage. This may be the problem I was experiencing with trying to regulate with the generic pain patch; now I’ve found the same thing to be true with the name-brand patches.

Amy made it back safely from Japan, but we haven’t seen much of her; she took a temporary job of â€œpet-sittingâ€ for friends on the other side of town. With the price of gasoline above $3.50 a gallon, it costs $7.00 for a trip over and back in the car, so she is staying at the house. She’s looking for a summer job on this side of town. Please pray for this.

Amy’s time of ministry was very good. She and Laura sang together at most of the services, and Amy gave her testimony with Laura translating. Several people have given their lives to God through the ministry of the church in recent weeks. Three other young people from our church have committed for a year’s ministry at the church and will leave within two weeks. In July, a larger team from our church will visit for three weeks; Laura will probably be very busy helping translate for the visitors and assisting them in getting settled. Laura doesn’t plan on coming home to visit us until October.

Among those who will go to Japan with the large team is our â€œadopted daughterâ€, Alicia Bechtle. She is praying for God’s direction for possible long-term ministry in Japan. We would miss her greatly as she has become such a vital member of our family, but we are willing to surrender her to the Lord as we have our other children. Please pray for God’s clear leading for Alicia.

I would also appreciate prayer for our future ministry. We have been â€œpointing towardsâ€ going to Kenya in January if Marty’s health permits. Marty says she’ll let me go for a short trip before then, but I want to do what God wants me to do. I do have two speeches scheduled in October for pro-life events; I don’t look forward to the spiritual warfare that always surrounds this kind of event or my trips abroad without the family. Yet, I’m willing to follow where God leads; He promised there were trials as well as great blessings in following Him. Please pray for my sensitivity to the Holy Spirit.

Please continue to pray for the ministry at Tenwek. Dr. Bryan Myers recently returned from a brief time of service in the OB department. Without full-time American staff, there have been some difficulties. For example, the fetal monitors have run out of paper, and the Kenyan staff has no mechanism in place or funds to order more; the paper isn’t available in Kenya. While I was there, I could anticipate this and make arrangements for a visitor to bring supplies without a major disruption costing the lives of little babies. Bryan and I will try to set up a more systematic way of dealing with these supply needs, but we need wisdom.

Dr. Russ White has fully recovered from his meningitis and resumed his normal workload. My protÃ©gÃ©, Dr. Kays Muruka, had a severe case of malaria just as Bryan Myers was leaving. He has since recovered and resumed work but not without a lot of suffering and pain beforehand. There’s a recurring theme here: there is a cost in following Jesus, but He never leaves or forsakes His followers.

Dr. Myers visited the Umoja Children’s Home; he reports everything was going well there, but he had no opportunity to visit the more outlying homes in his brief time of service. Pastor Kilel reports that many of the children have been sent away from the boarding schools since we haven’t been able to get the funds to them; however, we hope to send a wire transfer next week. The final transfer from the Christian Foundation should be ready by that time. Please pray that the staff would be able to process the last donations and make the wire transfer; please pray that God would safeguard that transfer.

At this time, please send all support for the orphans to our new ministry partner, Outreach Christian Fellowship.
Check mailed to and payable to: Outreach Christian Fellowship
PO Box 7637
Tyler TX 75711
Tel: 903-592-2358
Donors are to mark on a separate piece of paper that the donations are for the account of Paul Jarrett. Although they use my name on the account designation, none of these funds marked with my name go to me; these funds will be sent to the Tenwek Education Fund. You may also include the â€œsub-designationsâ€ of specific projects in the instructions. We will sort those out when we send the wire transfers, probably on a quarterly basis. Outreach Christian Fellowship will take 5% for administrative fees, which is reasonable since they have a full-time employee handling these and other funds; you should receive a receipt suitable for tax purposes in a timely manner.

You can visit their website at: http://www.outreachcf.org/ At this time there is no mention of our ministry on the website; perhaps this will follow in the future.

For those of you who visit our website at http://jarrettsministry.org for our updates, please do not leave comments on the website as personal messages. Our website gets hit daily with over 1,000 spam messages, usually from pornographic sources. I must delete all messages every few days to keep the website functioning but am unable to read all the messages; therefore, your kind messages are being deleted unread along with the unkind messages, which far outnumber yours.

You can send personal messages to our e-mail address at pauljar@gmail.com I have a spam filter on this account that automatically deletes the 100 or more spam messages that it receives daily. We are trying to fix the website by transferring all the information to a duplicate website that will have the same information, same address, and a better spam filter, but this is a time-consuming process.

With all this â€œnegativeâ€ talk of opposition and difficulties, I wanted to share some praise with you. God is in the business of caring for our every need, however small, even when we don’t formally pray about it.

I’ve been working full-time in the yard since the weather turned nice and Marty’s health improved enough to allow me to do so. One of my many projects has been improving the drainage of water runoff around the house. I’ve purchased many sections of four-inch field tile with different kinds of connecters, such as â€œT’sâ€ and â€œY’sâ€, so I know most of the available pieces.

One drain in front of the house has to sit out in plain view to divert the water away from the house and across the driveway; the gutter drains the front porch roof. I rigged up a short piece curved around at a 90-degree angle, but it didn’t really look quite right. I needed an â€œelbowâ€ piece but didn’t want to spend another $4 for it; after all, the water was going where I wanted it to go.

Returning home a few days later from one of my errands, I was driving on the main highway at 55 mph. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted what looked like the needed part lying on the side of the highway. Traffic wasn’t heavy at mid-day, so I turned around and returned to the spot. God had â€œspecial deliveredâ€ a brand-new part which was exactly what I needed to make the project look and function right. Thank you, Lord.

We do serve a God who loves us and cares for us in every circumstance â€“ even when it looks like we’re on our own. Yes, the cars wear out and need repairs; the mortgage payment and other bills still come regularly, and God continually meets these needs in His timingâ€”sometimes in ways that we don’t even notice or acknowledge. But some things just have His signature written all over itâ€”maybe not even a big, important thing. He sends us a little reminder that He loves us and cares for us, if we care to take notice, as we speed by in the rush of our lives.

Serving Jesus joyfully with you,

Paul, for the Jarretts

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