November Field Report

Spiritual Warfare and Sin: The Cost of Quitting For consider Him who endured such hostility from sinners against Himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls. You have not yet resisted to bloodshed, striving against sin.—Hebrews 12:3-4 If Satan opposes the new convert he opposes still more bitterly the Christian who is pressing on toward a higher life in Christ. The Spirit-filled life is not, as many suppose, a life of peace and quiet pleasure. It is likely to be something quite the opposite. Viewed one way it is a pilgrimage through a robber-infested forest; viewed another, it is a grim warfare with the devil. Always there is struggle, and sometimes there is a pitched battle with our own nature where the lines are so confused that it is all but impossible to locate the enemy or to tell which impulse is of the Spirit and which of the flesh.... My point here is that if we want to escape the struggle we have but to draw back and accept the currently accepted low-keyed Christian life as the normal one. That is all Satan wants. That will ground our power, stunt our growth and render us harmless to the kingdom of darkness. Compromise will take the pressure off. Satan will not bother a man who has quit fighting. But the cost of quitting will be a life of peaceful stagnation. We sons of eternity just cannot afford such a thing. That Incredible Christian, 73. "Oh God, don't ever let me compromise to take the pressure off! Keep me fit for battle; strengthen me for the constant warfare. Don't ever let me settle for 'peaceful stagnation' as long as I have breath to serve You. Amen."- A.W.Tozer The temptation is to give up. The temptation is to give in. We are encouraged to stay in the fight. So once again this update comes with a connection to a heavy heart. We have had many days in the past month tied to extreme physical difficulty. These difficult things have given us yet another opportunity to press in to our Heavenly Father and rely on Him for our strength and comfort. I will merely highlight some of the things we have been faced with as to not sound as my mom would have put it “a broken record”. Hurricane Sandy visited here before making her way to the east coast of the United States. She brought us 12-18 inches of rain in just a few short days. Our roads were washed out and we had more time than usual without power. Many people had water in their houses and had to deal with drying out their personal belongings. By God’s grace we had no loss of life where we live due to the storm. That was not the case for Haiti just 50 miles to the west of us. Over 40 people in Haiti lost their lives. So my neighborhood and I got together and we spent a day repairing our roads so that they would be passable. It was great to see everybody who uses the road chip in and work on it. Many water pipes are broken in our communities and a few cisterns have had problems causing people for many days after the storm to stand in line to receive water at a few projects that have a private well or water source. The main water pipe coming from the San Rafael River was broken and this is the supply that Everest a water filtering company uses to supply the water that they purify and sell in 5 gallon jugs (like Cloister etc… in the US) and they were out of drinking water for 3 days. We found another place that sold water. I bought 10 gallons of water from them and Jen and I both got sick from this water. Thank God the drinking water pipe has been fixed. As I am writing this (more than 2 weeks since Sandy) we just today were able to buy the pipes to fix the water to our house and pray we are able to once again get a secure water source for our family. Jen’s friend’s mother,  Flor has been battling TB for quite some time. This month she has taken a turn for the worse. She says that Jen is her “white daughter”. Jen has not stopped loving and reaching out to her family in the past 5 years they have known each other. Jen had the privilege of leading one of her daughters, Yulisa, to the Lord years ago and has been able to encourage the entire family in the Lord as they were all heart-broken when they lost their sister to TB just a few years ago. The sad thing about TB is that it is curable and no one needs to die from it. The problem is the treatment is difficult for someone living here. Let me take a minute to explain. The treatment consists of the patient going to the hospital/clinic every day for 10 months. If one treatment is missed they have to start all over. The problem here (and how well we understand) is that you never know if you are going to have transportation. And then if everything works out and you are able to get there, there is no guarantee the person administering the treatment will show up, and if everyone shows up there is no guarantee the medicine will be there. Since TB is contagious, the people who have it are not truthful and honest about why they are sick. If others know they have it they will be shunned. Here is a little excerpt from the WHO on the TB situation in the DR: “This high rate of MDR was associated with poor programme performance and lack of political will to fight the disease. TB control has now been implemented according to internationally recommended guidelines for more than 7 years, and a project to manage MDR-TB has recently started. The use of second-line drugs must be fully supervised to prevent the rise of extensively drug-resistant TB. New data on the magnitude of MDR-TB is urgently needed. In addition, a strengthened national network of properly-equipped laboratories with trained personnel and a fully functioning national reference laboratory are necessary to ensure access to quality-assured sputum smear microscopy, culture and drug-susceptibility testing. Surveillance efforts in the Dominican Republic, although following WHO/PAHO standards, need to be strengthened. While case reporting in DOTS areas suggests a steady increase in the number of cases detected, nationally there is an inconsistent pattern of increases and decreases. The quality of case finding across the country and TB programme/health system issues, such as the quality of the workforce, may be contributing factors explaining disparities.”- World Heath Organization Four in the Fire So as we continued through the last 30 days I had to take a trip to the Capitol to find parts for the broken transmission in the Van. Being unsucessful at finding replacement parts, I was successful though at finding a used transmission. We were so excited once the new (used) transmission was installed. Within three days however when Jen left to go to the hospital to pick up her friend Julia to visit with her mom Flor, the van decided to throw the crank through the engine. So once again we had been left without transportation. My friend Nathan had been here helping us with the new uniforms at the school for the children, he had asked to use my motorcycle to drive to the Mountain near Polo (La Lonza) to teach for the church service. On the way up the mountain something happened in the engine and the motor siezed up. Our electricity had been causing us problems last month and this month it was the turn for our water I guess. We had not had water at our house for 6 days from the storm, so I went to visit the person in charge of sending the water throughout the community. He encouraged me to tie in to a different line in the road. I bought the materials necesary and made the connections to only find out that the pipe we connected to was not any better than the one we had before. The next option was to buy 200+ feet of 1" pipe to tie directly in further up the mountain. As God was faithful to provide we were able to complete that work. When you have spent several days without a shower, washing dishes, and unable to drive anywhere to get water or just to make things a little easier, I must say I was looking inward. My focus was on my problems.As I pressed in and in my daily devotions God was faithful to meet me. He reminded me that Jesus is right there with me in my time of need. I read through the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. And it is such a sweet place to be when you realize that He is here with us THROUGH the fire.I echoed a similar prayer I am certain Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego had prayed ‘Lord, keep me in the fire continually if that’s what it takes for me to see You more clearly.’ “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11 NIV   Prayer Requests Visas...everything is turned in and our interview in the Capitol went great. Continued good health for all...allergies are going around and the mosquitos are really bad from all the rain Pray for Gods protection from Malaria, Dengue etc... Pray we are a light to this community...pray God would continue to give us opportunity to share Jesus with the people who live here in this community. Pray for our Sunday night Bible Study at our house and when our transportation situation is better we will pick up the Surfer Outreach in Bahouroco. Please pray for our transportation situation... we have been donated a van, and it has been a blessing... but as you know now the motor needs rebuilt. Please pray for us to become fluent in Spanish. It is our desire to communicate effectively, we all have learned a great deal of Spanish but we need to be at the next level so please ask God to enlarge our Spanish vocabulary. Please pray as we are waiting for School books for our children to be flown in, we need to get the homeschool running strong, we are behind so we need to double up on classroom time here. Please pray for God's mercy for our family in this area.We also need Math books for all of our children. Grade 8, Grade 6, Grade 5, Grade 4. Pray as we have a Team in December to work on a house for Wilkyns. Pray for favor with INDOTEL on the licensing of the Radio Station here in Barahona. Pray God would send laborers into His harvest field. We need help. Please ask God to send His workers. Answered Prayer Requests Visas...working on the visas has given us an opportunity to interact with our Lawyer Evelyn, and she invited us over to her house to share with us that her and her brother have received Christ and she shared how God had used our family to be a part of that ....PRAISE GOD! (her brother will soon be a DR Judge....God is so good!) Pray we are a light to this community...we took over 35 of the youth from our neighborhood on a campoy. We had a great time in the word, the night was very difficult and chalenging, however God has allowed a healing of a marriage from this, please pray for the marriages in ur community. Please pray for our transportation situation... after replacing the transmision, we are now rebuilding the engine, by Gods grace I needed to make 1/2 down payment on the work and the money came in actually ($5.00 over) what I needed within 30 minutes of when I needed it. God is so Good! We had  great time with First Baptist Church of Essex sharing Gods love with the community.. All the funding has been commited for Haiti 102.3!!! (over $9,000.00)the equipment has been ordered!!! Thank you for praying! Now we will plan an install trip in February 2013. If you are interested in Missions Radio in Haiti contact me for the details in helping with the work in February. The school is going well. God has kept things safe. 57 of the 60 children are sponsored! www.sponsorchildrenofhope.com So much more to say, so little space! Come see us. Praying for you all... God Bless you! Shawn Rineholt Ears To Hear Radio Ministries References Global tuberculosis control report: surveillance, planning, finance. Geneva: WHO; 2007 (WHO/HTM/TB/2007.376). Available at: http://www.who.int/tb/publications/global_report/en/