It was such a blessing to get to connect with our families this summer. We got to spend 4th of July week with the Witts in Michigan, we were able to connect with our Delaware Bible Church family (our sending church), and we got to spend time with our “tribe” by attending the Charis Fellowship national conference in Columbus. What a blessing to get to share with so many of our beloved, faithful supporters, and what an encouragement it was to hear how God has used our difficult journey to strengthen the faith of many!
I’ve noticed as we get older that birthdays get sneakier every year. Last year was the first year I lost track of how old I was, and this year, I don’t even think I’d have realized my birthday was coming up until the week of, if not for Chelsea’s daily reminder that hers is coming up soon. September is more commonly known in our family as “birthday month,” since three of us (Kara, Orrin, and Chelsea) were born this month! It’s just amazing to me how an event that as a child holds a level of importance and excitement second only to Christmas, can get lost in the busyness and shifting priorities of adulthood. Maybe it’s a sign of maturity that we’ve grown up and stopped thinking the world revolves around us? Either way, I’m glad I have my kids to remind me of these things, because forgetting my own birthday would also mean forgetting Kara’s (two days before mine), and that would not be a good career move! For any that don’t know, Kara’s birthday is September 14th, and she will be a beautiful 36 this year. Please let her know if God has used her in your life! I know that would be a huge blessing to her.
Some of the busyness that has filled our attention of late has been a very welcome return to the full cadence of activities with homeschooling, church planting, and the like. The kids are back to being involved in extracurriculars, our church life has gotten busy again (in good ways), and it feels really good to resume some normalcy after a year and a half of what felt like our lives being stuck on pause. Our church celebrated our two-year anniversary yesterday, and we had 90 people in attendance, including about 20 students from Great Commission Bible Institute that had spent the week at our church reading the whole Bible, cover to cover!
Kara’s treatments have become somewhat routine, though we eagerly look forward to the end of those. She had her eleventh immunotherapy treatment today, which leaves just three remaining. Nine more weeks, and she’ll finally be done; praise the Lord! One thing was not routine about this one though: insurance. Up to this point, Kara’s treatments have been covered by Medicaid, but due to being beyond one year postpartum, she no longer qualifies for that anymore. Anyone who’s had to deal with public assistance knows that there’s a whole long story there about government incompetence and inefficiency that I won’t go into. We knew this was coming, but they didn’t actually tell us when the coverage would end, so suffice to say, it has left us with a one-month gap in her insurance coverage. Fortunately she is supposed to be covered under another income-based program that will hopefully pay her bills, but due to the aforementioned way the government operates, we ask for prayers that the system would work for us as intended and that the process would be smoother than it has been up to this point. I don’t want to sound ungrateful; we have been blessed to have the coverage we’ve had until now.
To answer a question many of you will have, I’m not totally sure what our financial needs will be as it pertains to health costs going forward. Starting next month we will be finding out about premiums, co-pays, deductibles, out-of-pocket maximums, which together will be around $2,000 by the end of the year. There are also therapies that aren’t covered by insurance which, when we’ve been able to afford them, have been very beneficial to Kara’s recovery from her treatments. Also, Kara needs some significant dental work to address some issues that, believe it or not, may have contributed to her developing cancer in the first place. These are all out-of-pocket costs for us totaling in the thousands.
We need your support! Even if we weren’t on this cancer journey, we would still be church planting missionaries. We raise about a third of our financial support from friends like y’all. The church is growing again, and we are still hoping to reach financial sustainability by the end of next year. In the meantime, we are so thankful for your continued support of our ministry! Your monthly giving allows us to keep focused on what God has called us to do. If you haven’t yet, please consider supporting the Witt family in Florida!