My dad called the other day, as he often does, and asked what I was doing. “Just sitting here working,” I told him. He laughed because that’s where he always finds me. What in the world would a missionary being doing all day on the internet? Well, here’s just one example:
Monday – Just a week ago today, I got an e-mail from Alberto in Colombia. Alberto is a former student of ours who has blossomed into a tremendous cross-cultural church planter. He and his wife have learned the Guahibo tribal language fluently and are working day and night teaching and discipling Guahibo Bible teachers. Because of his successful experience, he naturally was called on to help other church planters and was also given the hat of consultant (the reward for achievement is more responsibility)
So, Alberto writes me because he is looking for the list of the Old Testament passages that need to be translated in order to teach the Bible.
In the old days of missions, Bible translation was generally limited to the New Testament. If the O.T. was translated in to the tribal tongues, it usually was done in the form of Bible stories. But since we have adopted the stategy of teaching the Bible chronologically from the beginning, we have found it very important to translate Genesis and many portions from the rest of the Old Testament.
Alberto needed the O.T. passage list. He had asked around the field and nobody seemed to have it. He couldn’t write to the Field Ministries Office (FMO) at our mission offices in Florida because he doesn’t write English, so he wrote to us. I told him I would get right on it.
Tuesday – By the next day, I had an answer from the FMO. They sent me a PDF copy of an in-house publication that included the chart (in English).
Wednesday – I worked for about an hour making a copy of the chart in MS Word, then discovered I could edit the PDF file with my Acrobat program, which saved me a bunch of time. Then I sent both the partial Word version and the complete PDF version to Alberto, asking that if he got inspired to complete the chart in Word, would he send us a copy?
Thursday – Alberto thanked us for the chart and sent us the completed Word version. Then we proceeded to forward his chart to the other Spanish-speaking NTM fields (Mexico, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay) and training centers.
By posting the list to our online library at www.ntm-materiales.org, this resource is now also available to any missionary with internet access, whether they are with NTM or with another mission or working independently.
Although this is something of a “SLR nerd story”, I wanted to share it with you to show how our “resource hub” is benefitting the Spanish-speaking cross-cultural missionaries in this hemisphere. By investing in our ministry, you make that service possible!
Steve & Eida Irwin
Spanish Language Resources (SLR)
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