It was scary to send our two New Testament Manubu’ translations off to the Philippine Bible Society (PBS) to be printed as real Bibles rather than the big, two volume laser printed ones we’ve had. It is God’s Word that we’re dealing with here and after weeks of complicated formatting and converting to PDF files for printing and proofreading over and over we still wonder if maybe some word or verse number or verse got lost somewhere in the process. Or will the inking be too heavy so it bleeds through making it hard to read or will the inking be too light? Will the printer somehow get pages mixed up? One shudders at the thought of spending $20,000 or more to have the Bibles printed and then find out there is a serious problem with all two thousand copies. But, we have done all we can and it is in God’s hands just like it has been from the first day we started translating over twenty years ago.
We flew out to town from our tribal village this past Monday and sent the disks with the files and a laser printed copy of each of the two dialect translations to PBS in Manila. They said that they will have proofs for us to look at in about three weeks, and about two weeks after we have approved the proofs they will start to print. So we are staying at our NTM guest house here in town waiting for the proofs to be ready. When the proofs are ready we will fly to Manila to look at them and probably stay in Manila to see how the first pages look when they come off the press. Then we will return to our village. When the printing is all done and the covers have been put on PBS will ship them to our NTM guest house. PBS says that from start to finish should take about three months.
Please PRAY for the Philippine Bible Society as they print these Bibles – that all will come out well.
We’re not idle while as we wait here in town. Gene is setting up a new laptop with all the software we use. He is finding that there is quite a bit of our software that won’t work because the new laptop has Windows 7 while our software was for older versions of Windows. So he’s already spent hours on the internet looking for replacements. Please PRAY that he will be able to get everything working well. It will probably take a week or so to finish it.
Carol is also busy on her computer updating our data base with changes we made while preparing for printing.
Please also PRAY for Dani. He is a Bible teacher at one of the lowland Manubu’ churches. He is thinking about starting a new outreach in three villages where the people haven’t yet had influence from outside religions but are still appeasing spirits. PRAY that he would go ahead with this outreach, if the Lord wills, and that there will be a good response. As we’ve explained in the past, it is a many month – actually a many year commitment to teach through the evangelistic phase and then to continue teaching those who believe until there are Bible teachers and church leaders raised up from among the men who have believed the gospel of grace and are saved.
If it were not for people like you who pray and give there would not be Manubu’ believers, and there would not be the scriptures in their language. We trust that you too are rejoicing over what God has done – and will continue to do.