Over the next four days, we’ll travel for about 30 hours over roughly 1900 miles. Over the next four months, we’ll be logging closer to 120 hours and 7200 miles… and that’s only the long-distance time in the minivan! Given the lack of a US frequent driver miles program (as far as I know), you may legitimately be wondering why we’re going the distance.
Amy and I are missionaries from Peaceful Valley Church with New Tribes Mission. Our ultimate goal, as we follow after the Lord, is to see a mature church planted among people who have never before had access to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As God leads us toward this end in Mexico, we’ve been training at a Bible school and missions training center in the United States. Today’s journey marks the beginning of the end of our training – a final 10-week course that will wrap up my (Jordan’s) linguistics course.
For the next seven weeks, we will be in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. My classmates and I will be partnering with members of the local Cherokee church, studying the Cherokee language and using our linguistics skills to analyze everything from individual sounds to the structure of stories. We’ll then have three weeks in Missouri to write up what we understand, providing us with both an excellent training tool and a way to judge what we’ve learned to this point.
It would be an understatement to say that we would love to have you praying for us! Our travel will be long and tiring, the language study promises to be difficult and frustrating, and we will certainly greatly miss friends and family while we’re absent from you! But ultimately, the challenge is more than worth its cost – because so long as one person is without access to God’s Word, we have a responsibility to fulfill the Great Commission and go! Please pray that we will rest in the Lord throughout this process of training and equipping, and that He will not only give us the tools we need to serve Him in missions… but use this experience to shape us more closely into images of Jesus, His only Son.