Piduy has returned from his trip to help Mahan by starting to translate the evangelical Bible lessons into the language of the people Mahan hopes to teach. Piduy had visited there a few weeks ago, and made friends with a man, Maykil, who said that he would like to listen to the teaching and would be willing to help translate the lessons.
This trip, Piduy spent more than two weeks there and wasn’t able to accomplish what he went for. Maykil has houses in two different villages. He would tell Piduy to meet him at one of those houses on a certain day, and they would work on translating. Piduy spent most of his time there running back and forth between the villages with the Bible teacher motorcycle burning up fuel and finding that Maykil was always busy with something else and couldn’t help him. He finally gave Maykil the first couple of lessons and asked him to read them when he had time and underline the words he doesn’t know so they could get together and discuss them. Maykil did take the lessons and underline words, but afterwards said that it is so much work to do it there should be two or three working on it with him and all would have to be paid wages. Piduy never was able to get together with Maykil to discuss the words he underlined.
Piduy said that during the day it is primarily women who are around in the villages and they tend to be drunk and not helpful. Piduy came back pretty discouraged. Mahan plans to move back home here to our village in October as the way things are where he is now his gift of teaching God’s Word can’t be exercised and there are places closer where he could teach while waiting for God to open the way where he has been living and hoping to teach.
The circumstances of Mahan’s in-laws ending up in that far-away place and then asking Mahan and his family to join them there and teach God’s Word to the Manubu’ there were so strange that it could only have been a God engineered thing. So, what’s going on? We’ll just have to wait and see what God’s next step is. Perhaps Maykil or others there will eventually want to hear so badly that they will want to help translate the lessons even without wages. Perhaps Maykil or someone else will want to move here where there is plenty of land to farm and help translate the lessons. We don’t know, but we are not discouraged because we do know that God is perfectly capable of having plans concerning those people that we could never even imagine. So, let’s PRAY that those people Mahan went to teach will indeed eventually be taught and be saved. Doesn’t God want all people everywhere to be saved?
We’re excited that Dani, a Manubu’ Bible teacher in the lowlands, has begun recording our lowland dialect New Testament. And Tilmun is just about to start recording our mountain dialect New Testament. Please PRAY for them – that their reading will sound natural and clear. It will take many hours of their time so we do have to pay them wages to do this. If you would like to be a part of the recording of the Manubu’ New Testaments through helping to finance it you can send contributions to the Manubu’ project fund account, not to our personal account. Send the funds to New Tribes Mission, 1000 E 1st Street, Sanford, FL 32771-1487. Please memo your check and also include a note that it is for the 6MANU account. You can either designate it specifically for New Testament recording or not specify and any extra will be used for other Manubu’ projects such as printing many, many copies of Bible lessons. If designated funds amount to more than the cost of recording we would use the extra funds to help Manubu’ buy MP3 players to use to listen to the scriptures. It is hard to know exactly how much it will cost to record the New Testament in the two dialects including editing errors in reading, but it might be about $1,000.
We’re now working on translating more of the Old Testament. We’ve been praying that God would increase our support as the cost of many translation helpers in two dialects is considerable. We PRAISE Him for answered prayer as last month and this month there have been a couple of special gifts that are a great help. Isn’t it amazing how we can just pray, and God moves believers somewhere to answer that prayer sometimes even before we have prayed!
Let us serve Him with gladness!