image001.wmz March 2013, Letter #83
The first two months of the New Year have gone already. Wow. It seems like the older we get the faster time flies past us. January marked thirty-one years since we first stepped foot in PNG as a young missionary couple expecting our first child. Now we are not so young, have four grown children and three grandkids. We thank the Lord for his love, grace and continual presence in our lives all these years. It has been three decades of stops and starts in our ministry, family issues that tried our faith sorely and of course, many blessings through it all from the Father of Lights from whom all good things come.
This year’s highlights so far include an unprecedented increase in Sunday service attendance. We have gone from just a handful to nearly forty men, women and children (a big group by Dom standards) coming to hear God’s Word taught from the Old Testament with applications to the New. After the many years it has taken to teach through the New Testament we have gone back to the Old, using Betty Lukens’s 12 inch flannel (felt actually) graphs that really bring the accounts to life. Tying these Bible accounts of what the Lord did in the Old Testament times to the life of Christ and the teachings of the epistles seems to be speaking to our Dom listeners like nothing else before. It is a challenge to keep up on translating these OT portions while trying to finish up the NT for publication but the Lord enables and we are very grateful to our Dom friend and brother in Christ, Gena for all his help. And as a personal bonus I, Jim am learning so much through the necessary study to prepare these Sunday lessons. It truly is a win-win thing all around.
Jim is checking through John with a man named Joel. Not sure of Joel’s salvation. He sometimes comes to church. They often know the right words but their lives do not reflect a walk with God. Pray that he will respond to God’s Word as they check it. After John he needs to check Revelation with at least two people. Jim and I have 5 books to read through to make sure that it is all there in both the translation and in the Back to English for the final check. Then we begin the final stages of getting the books ready for printing. Sometimes we thought the end would never come but we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
Another highlight is literacy. Sadly, we have had many students drop out but the few that remain are learning to read so well that we are encouraged anyway. For many years we have had glitches in the Dom orthography (the alphabet/system of writing) that we just didn’t know what to do with and these were a stumbling block for those learning to read their own Dom language. At last though it seems that we have found solutions to these glitches and it has greatly improved the reading acquisition of those students who have stuck with it. Praise the Lord indeed for this. It is a big milestone for us.
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