Help is On the Way!!!

Office work!!!!

Grab a handful of confetti and toss it in the air because help is on the way! A new North

Mary Faith

American missionary, Mary Faith Yoder, is going to be moving to Honduras to join the Sowers4Pastors team. S4P could not be happier about it. This is particularly good news for Trish.

Throughout the early years of the ministry, Trish was focused on running a household and being a homeschooling mom. Her plate was full but she also did things like writing the newsletters and teaching Sunday school lessons. She describes herself as a minor player in the ministry during that time. The fact that so many of her children are now involved in full-time mission work would indicate she wasn’t really a minor player at all, but you get her point. She wasn’t involved in much of the day-to-day operations of Sowers4Pastors back then. 

Just at the point when she wasn’t homeschooling a whole passel of kids, the sponsorship program came into being. When it first started, Trish really, really didn’t want to be the person in charge of maintaining all of the record-keeping. She had hoped to move into a more creative aspect of the ministry. Alas, Trish ended up being the person to step into the role of chief runner of the website. It was not her dream job but she has done it faithfully since 2018. 

Trish pointed out that during these years she has learned “how to do a lot of things that you only learn through trial and error.” She became an expert at contacting customer support for the website. She learned how to do surprisingly tricky mundane tasks such as changing a donor’s email address on the website. (There are more steps to this than you might imagine!) She can manipulate the site to make it run specific reports - also surprisingly tricky! She became the go-to person on staff for that sort of thing. 

Trish's not-ready-for-Instagram
workspace in Florida

Trish said, “People come to you because you’re the person who has already spent the time figuring out how to do things. That’s fine, since it saves time for everyone. But what happens if someday I can’t do it anymore? It’s not that I’m retiring. I’m not out of the picture! But we want to know that if something should happen to me there will be someone else who knows how to complete all of those tasks. Mary Faith is the person coming in to learn how to do this.”

Finding people who are dedicated to being behind-the-scenes support staff isn’t an easy task. As Trish said, “Office work doesn’t make for great selfies on Instagram.”

Mary Faith came down to Honduras last year for a month to see if this was something she felt called to pursue. During that time, she learned a lot about using the system. Everyone believes she will get up to speed quickly. She’s coming for another short-term visit soon - and at a perfect time, as it’s the season when all of the sponsorship kids’ profiles are updated. This is the time of year when it becomes impossible for Trish to keep up with all of the updates and her regular work. There are tight deadlines for the profile updates because churches in the States set up sponsorship Sundays to encourage new sponsors to sign up, and all of that church's children need to be updated by that set date. It’s a big load of work on a tight schedule. 

Sowers4Pastors website donation page
(click photo for better viewing)

Unlike the Honduran staff who work on salary, the goal is for North American missionaries to raise their own support. (If you're curious about why we handle things this way, click here for a blog post about that!) Raising support is what Mary Faith is working on now, so that she can move to Honduras and work with Sowers4Pastors full time! Please consider helping her, through prayers and financial support. In the past some of the potential North American staff members didn’t work out. Sometimes people would visit with a team and expect that daily tasks during non-team times would still involve fun things like playing games with small children all the time. Mary Faith is well aware that the bulk of her responsibilities will be more like customer service tasks with a smattering of accounting thrown in for good measure. She is up for the job! Helping to support Mary Faith through prayers and donations is one very tangible way to support the ongoing work of Sowers4Pastors. (Mary Faith has been added to the list of donation categories on the website, to make it easy to donate toward her support).

- posted by Christi

Having Allen's Back

"Don't worry. I've got your back!" That's something you might hear whenever someone is letting you know that they are there to support you. Right now, it's something that Allen needs to hear because his actual back is causing him grief! After dealing with back issues for most of his adult life, the pain has finally caught up with him.

Allen’s long history with back pain stems from a combination of weight lifting as a young man, construction work, a minor car accident that happened years ago, and his incessant need to help lift any heavy object in need of lifting. Over the years, the damage would get better. Then it would get worse. But, as Trish shared, “He always considered it to be manageable. Until it wasn’t.”

The proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back” moment came while Allen was on the current backpack collection trip. He had just arrived in the US and the pain was different. Instead of only being in his back, the pain was radiating down his limbs. That might have been a good time to stop pushing. However, Allen is not a person who stops until a job is done. So, he pushed on.

He completed the first leg of the trip. And the pain was pretty bad. He completed the second leg of the trip. And the pain was still pretty bad. When it was time for the third leg of the trip…Holy moly! The pain was so bad that even Allen had to stop. 

Kirstin completed the trip by herself. In a giant Penske truck, she drove from Mississippi, where she picked up backpacks collected in Texas and Mississippi, through Alabama where she also picked up backpacks, and back to Florida. It all got done while Allen waited in Florida. 

Allen, Kirstin, and Esdras were scheduled to fly back to Honduras today (October 19th). That won’t be happening for Allen. Instead, Trish will be flying to Florida next week, to join him. The plan is to find out what can be done for Allen’s back, and get it taken care of! They anticipate there will be at least one surgery involved. The damage from the long-ago car accident is in his neck and the other damage is in the lower back, so… Who knows? 

Because they have been in Honduras for decades, Allen and Trish only had minimal health insurance in the US. That always worked out well since healthcare costs are so much lower in Honduras. The insurance was mainly to cover costs in case Allen got sick or was injured on a backpack collection trip. Options for spinal surgery in Honduras are not great, and if they were, there would still be the issue that Allen is not currently in Honduras. The insurance they already had wasn’t going to cut it, so Allen found a different health insurance. Due to their low income, they qualified for an Affordable Care Act plan that doesn’t exclude pre-existing conditions. That will kick in on November 1st. In November, Allen will see a doctor and, hopefully, get plans to ease the back pain, and start taking steps to resolve the causes of the pain.

The new insurance plan requires all medical treatment to be in Florida. That brings up the next issue… Allen and Trish needed a place to stay. Since this could drag on for months, they needed to not be guests in someone’s home. And, in order to keep expenses down, they needed a place where Trish could cook, do laundry, etc. 

View from the cottage where Allen and
Trish will be staying!

Trish said, “We have been blessed by the generosity of a supporter.” The supporter is someone Trish met in an online homeschooling forum, back in the day. “She and her husband have a home in coastal Georgia with a guest cottage. It’s a two-bedroom cottage with a full kitchen and all of the amenities. It’s off in the woods by itself. If you put it together like a dream, this is what you’d come up with. It’s about an hour from Florida. We’re hoping to get treatment set up in Jacksonville and to remain in Georgia for as long as we can. It may be necessary to move around a bit, if the locations of the needed care requires us to be farther south.”

What does this mean for the ministry? Trish will continue doing her ministry work online. Everything else is in the very capable hands of Brandy, Rachel, Kirstin, and the rest of the staff. They will get the containers, etc. Trish anticipates that they will likely pass out the backpacks before she and Allen return home. 

How can you have their backs? Obviously, both Allen and Trish can use your prayers. Trish is preparing now, to leave her house empty for an unknown period of time. Allen does not have a reputation for being a patient patient in the best of times. These are not the best of times. He’s in a lot of pain and he isn’t sleeping well. Since there's not much he can do, we can expect that he will be experiencing boredom, as well.

You can also help with the additional financial burdens by donating through the website and selecting Allen and Trish Sowers Support from the dropdown menu.  It has been suggested that Trish set up an Amazon wishlist, for people who would like to help them with some of their needs while they will be in the US. Others have suggested restaurant or grocery gift cards might be helpful. If you're interested in helping in any of these ways (or you have some other way you'd like to help), you can contact Trish at trish @ sowers4pastors.com.

Trish said, “We’re just taking this day by day. God has brought us through difficult times in the past, and we know that He has this in hand, too.” - posted by Christi