Hey y’all!
We last wrote you after the Bolivia Leadership Forum and before our annual trip to escape the Texas heat for our much-anticipated visit with Esther & Curtis and our Nova Scotian grandkids. As you can see, we had a wonderful time — I had to get up pretty early in the morning to squeeze a little work in before the fun began. The kids are so creative — this pallet-and-plastic-bottle raft they built entertained them for days!
After we got back home, we capped off the summer family fun with Art and Kaylene at Chick-Fil-A and a lady clown with some great balloon-tying skills.
(For more grandkid pictures, check out our Facebook pages — either Eida’s or mine: https://www.facebook.com/steve.irwin .)
Our mission leadership sent me home from Bolivia with a big job to complete. I was asked to translate the new revision of the Global Ministries Agreement (GMA). The GMA is the governing document of Global Partners, an international fellowship of mission agencies and associations that grew from the seedbed of NTM. After I finished the Spanish version of the GMA, it was checked by Juan Horta, our regional director, then distributed to the leadership teams of our partner entities for their review and feedback.
One of the big tasks in the process of transitioning from NTM to Ethnos360 and Global Partners is moving our online library of Spanish Language Resource materials to a new SharePoint website. There are hundreds of articles and books that the SLR team has translated to Spanish in the 19 years since we started this translation ministry.
Unfortunately, each text file has to be uploaded to our new Global Partners SharePoint site manually, and a description written. For the last six months, I’ve been uploading new projects to it already as we complete them, but I need to bite the bullet and just dedicate a couple of weeks or maybe a month to systematically cataloging all the items in the previous library and uploading them to the new one. Pray for patience and efficiency.
Meanwhile, one of our teammates is working on a history of the mission and the other is working on Dr. Deibler’s A Translation for Translators, written by a senior translation consultant for Wycliffe Bible Translators. It was written to express more plainly the meaning implicit in the original languages of Scripture (feel free to ask if you’d like a better explanation). There are very few resources like this available in Spanish for cross-cultural church-planters doing Bible translation. It’s expensive because of its size — it’s actually an amplified version of the entire Bible — and we need to pay our Colombian translator to work on it with us.
Please pray for funding for that project. We’re applying for a grant of $5,000 but even if it is approved, we’ll need another $35,000 or so to finish all the books of the Bible.
Project page: https://ethnos360.org/projects/spanish-translation-resource
As long as we’re asking for prayer, we’d also appreciate your intercession for our living situation. Home ownership comes with unexpected expenses, like a recent termite treatment (which also wiped out a nest of carpenter ants we didn’t know about) and some issues with our tile floor (which may or may not be under warranty). A big concern hanging over our heads is the long wooden fence around our yard, which is getting rather “see-through-ish” in places.
God has always been faithful to provide for all our needs since we took the plunge into “living by faith” in 1980, and we trust His promise: “Even to your old age and gray hairs… I am He who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you.” Isaiah 46:4.
Many thanks to each of you for your faithful and encouraging partnership!
We love you,
Steve & Eida Irwin
Ethnos360.org
steve_irwin@ntm.org
Cell – 408-515-1721
Postal – 1009 Lantana Ct, Leander TX 78641
Leave a Reply