November 7, 2018
Dear Family and Friends,
I am steering away from using my typical prayer letter format for this report. I have some very important news I need to share with you and we need your prayers. At the end of June of this year, we came back to the US for 3 month furlough. Our plans were to spend time with our children and grandchildren, visit churches, have some medical check ups and then return to Tanzania.
During this time Beth visited the doctor with some nagging stomach pain. The
doctor evaluated her and properly diagnosed her, but gave her orders to get a CT scan just to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. The CT scan revealed that Beth has a large cyst and tumor on her kidney. This was not causing her any pain so it came as a surprise to us. After being evaluated by three different urologists, they have all concluded that it is most likely cancer and it needs to be removed. We are thankful to God that it was discovered early and appears to be contained within the kidney.
This has been a challenging time for us, and yet we see God’s guiding hand through this journey. He has comforted us through our family and friends, and has lead us to a doctor that is a urological cancer specialist. This urologist will try and save part of her kidney, if possible. The surgery is scheduled for November 20 in the morning.
We covet your prayers for this surgery that the cancer will be contained to her kidney, that it will be smaller than originally thought, and that the doctor can remove the cancer without removing all of her kidney.
In other news….
The Neema House Baptist Church is doing well without us being there! We are in the process of turning over to Tanzanian leadership and this has been an excellent opportunity for the church leaders to lead the church without me there. In October, we had another two week pastoral training class. This program is called Bible Training Center for Pastors (BTCP) and there were 14 pastors and church leaders in attendance.
In Him,
Mitch and Beth
