Greetings from rainy Seattle. 12,000 miles and 26 States later we find ourselves here in the Pacific Northwest visiting Judy’s former home church and many old friends.
For those of you who do not receive our email updates, on April 18th a very powerful earthquake knocked our house down in the Dom, destroyed our garage and basically up heaved the ground all around our home. Some of our people also lost their houses and food gardens and find themselves in dire straits. Our house is still intact but damaged. To what extent we do not know yet. (See pictures of house).
In light of what has happened many are wondering what our plans are for when we return, God willing, to PNG in July. The short answer is that we are still praying about it. We basically have three options. One is to stay put and repair the house as best we can.
Another option is to move and rebuild in Kapia Joseph’s village near where we lived and ministered for our first 12 years. No doubt Kapia and the Christians there would welcome us back gladly. However we are considering another option which is to relocate to an entirely new area of the Dom where the true Gospel has not been made known. The area we have in mind is near enough to ‘..’ so that the Dom Christians there can participate in evangelizing this new group (who happen to be their traditional enemies). We are excited about this idea. It would be a huge step of faith and a bit scary to tell the truth. But if this is God stirring our hearts to move in this direction then we can go in confidence. We simply must wait patiently until we return to PNG to assess the situation.
Our leadership feels that the land is now unstable and it would be best to move. If we truly do that and we are at this point heading in that direction, we are looking at a huge financial and physical undertaking of getting what materials we can from our present house and moving it and rebuilding. The materials have already been used at least twice and a lot of them would not be re-useable again. In light of this, many new materials would need to be purchased.
There have been a number of folk wanting to help so we now have an account for this purpose. Please send any gifts for this made out to New Tribes Mission with a separate note that it is for the CIP Burdett House PNG-Field Fund. Thank you so much for your love, interest, and prayer regarding this.
We do not totally understand why at this point in the Dom work this would happen, but we rest assured in the fact that God is all-knowing and we can trust in His sovereignty and bigger plan that we are not always aware of. Nothing takes God by surprise.
Because of what happened in PNG with our house, we have felt the urgency to return to PNG sooner than planned, returning in July instead of September. Unfortunately, we have had to cut out seeing many people that we were planning to see. It was not an easy decision. Please be praying that we get our visa, ticket money (about $4,000?), relocating funds and for the Dom Christians to understand why we are moving, etc. Also Jim’s laptop of several years has just crashed so we will need to get a new one.
Your missionaries to the Dom, Jim and Judy Burdett