Water to Drink

Whew! Back into the land of the cold and the dead. My mother and I just returned from a trip to Friendswood, Texas to speak to my grandparents' friends and church about my Wycliffe ministry. The Lord was good; many people seemed interested in the work of Bible translation and He added several new partners to my Wycliffe team! Please pray that more of those I spoke to will desire to be a part of the exciting transformative work the Lord is doing for His kingdom around the world.

It was also a good to spend time with my grandparents and sister, not to mention that the weather was beautiful. We spent Sunday afternoon drinking in the sun, listening to the birds chirp and watching the lovely blossoms while it was freezing up here in north Texas. Soon we will be enjoying all of the above-mentioned things up here...I hope :).


Now on to another one of those fascinating comparisons about Bible translation and Papua New Guinea from the PNG Experience blog that I highly enjoy and hope you do as well.

Abundant Water

Physical life demands water in order to survive. In Papua New Guinea, water is abundant in most places and life displays its green color everywhere. Just like the physical life craves water, so the spiritual life craves Scripture. However, in PNG, there are plenty of places where the Scriptures are not translated into the language of the area. There, the spiritual life can become quite dry...like drinking from a rock. Pray that the almost 300 languages that need a translation project started would find resources to begin.

No water here!

Wycliffe Updates

The Lord is working slowly but surely in my life. Sometimes I wish it was a tad faster, but His timing is always perfect (as I keep telling myself). So, here are some awesome things God has done in the last few days with regards to my Wycliffe ministry:

• Today I was accepted to the Canada Institute of Linguistics for their summer program. I need to take these classes before I can serve the Lord in the beautiful land of Papua New Guinea. 
• I now have 26% of my monthly financial pledges and 69% of my one-time gifts. Praise the Lord for this great jump in my one-time expenses! Again, I need to have each kind of expense at 100% before I can go overseas with Wycliffe. Slowly but surely, my friends.
• I have the opportunity to go to Houston this week to speak to my grandparents' friends and church about the awesome things God is doing through my life and Wycliffe. 

Thank you for journeying along with me in this exciting adventure! You are essential to getting God's word to those who don't have it yet. 

Learning the Value of Internships

*This post from the Wycliffe blog is about my sweet friend, Leah Doty, whom I met at training in November in Orlando, Florida. She will be serving the Lord in SE Asia as soon as she reaches 100% with her financial partnership.

Leah's family

Bible translation is in Leah's blood. It began with her grandparents, long-time translators in Southeast Asia. And it continued with her parents, faithful administrators and translators in Kenya, Thailand, the Philippines and the Solomon Islands.

 Then it came time for Leah to decide what to do. She studied at Houghton College, knowing that she wanted to work in Bible translation, but she was unsure of how or where.

Leah turned to internships with Wycliffe and SIL (one of Wycliffe's primary partners) to help her figure it out. Her first internship took her to Dallas, where she served the Language and Culture Archives department, helping former linguists archive their untapped resources.

"It was good to get perspective on what happens there," Leah recalls. "The resources we're producing need to be made accessible, (but I learned that) archives is not my life's calling."

Next Leah signed up for a internship that took her to Northeast Thailand, where she worked in Scripture engagement, facilitated workshops by assisting local Rit people in developing curriculum.

"(There) I got to contribute to the literacy of the Rit people, lending skills that were in demand," leah recounted. "It was great."

Leah's extended family 

But as the internship came to an end, Leah wasn't ready to finish her linguistics work. She was finally sure of what she wanted to do in Bible translation-linguistics in Southeast Asia, where her family has worked for generations.

"I'm excited to take and interest in peoples' language in order to communicate love and value to them-primarily, to see communities transformed by the work we do," she said.

Now, Leah is headed back to a country where she grew up, and the internship process was critical to finding her own place in missions.

"(The internships) kind-of exemplified two different sides of what Wycliffe and SIL do," Leah said. "There's a diversity of work that we do and it was good to see a couple different perspectives (of that."

Now, more than ever, Leah feels connected to a purpose bigger than herself- and, besides her family, she has her internships to thank for that.

Leah Doty 

"I want to see the message of the gospel transform society, change the world."

How Do I Get Down?

A long way down!

The rugged terrain in Papua New Guinea makes travel difficult. Can you imagine trying to get down from the top of this mountain? While they make for beautiful scenery and waterfalls, they also become barriers that make getting from one village to another almost impossible. One of the jobs desperately needed is language surveying. Surveyors travel to these rugged locations to determine more information about a language and to gauge the interest in language development projects. Pray for safety as these teams travel throughout PNG.


*This post was taken from the PNG Experience blog. 

Yum! Bananas for Breakfast

Breakfast of Champions

Sliced bananas on cereal may sound familiar, but that is not the only way to eat bananas for breakfast. How about roasted over a fire? Now that's a great way to start the day. It isn't hard to imagine that people all over the world do things differently and enjoy the difference. What is hard, is recognizing that the way you usually do something is not always the best way. Language workers in Papua New Guinea have to evaluate their way of thinking and make sure that they are not missing an opportunity to embrace a new way of doing things. The cultural context in which they work may offer a better solution for that language. Pray for flexibility and adaptability as new ways of working in languages are discovered. 

*The above post was taken from the PNG Experience blog. 

Looking Beneath the Surface

Coral Reef

It can be really hard to know how big a project will be when a language group is surveyed for the first time. Language surveyors need lots of wisdom as they investigate the various nuances of a remote language group to see if they are good candidates for a Bible translation project in Papu New Guinea. These surveyors travel many kilometers, and many of them are done on foot. They have a limited amount of time to study the prospective group's interest and support for the project and then must decide if they will be a good candidate. Pray that they can make good decisions so that more projects can be started in 2015.


*This post was taken from the PNG Experience blog.