Summer News

I guess summer isn’t officially over yet, but school has already started here in central Texas and everyone is looking forward to those cooler fall temperatures — like below 100!

These photos are souvenirs from our annual visit with Esther and Curtis and our grandkids in Nova Scotia. We enjoyed celebrating Steve’s and Esther’s birthdays there once more. This one was a milestone for Steve as he reached the big SIXTY-FIVE. (Hello, Medicare!)

It’s been a productive summer for Spanish Language Resources. Among the materials we’ve translated are…

• A stack of materials for the Literacy Seminar in Perú, where missionaries from as far away as Mexico and the nation east of Colombia were trained to create a Literacy Curriculum to teach people how to read and write their own aboriginal languages. This is a key skill for spiritual growth and church development.
• A brief missionary biography — from a series of testimonies of veteran missionaries which inspire trainees and active church planters to trust God through faith-testing experiences.
• An essay applying 1 Cor. 13 to the challenges of cross-cultural church planting in a tribal village.
• Statements regarding the MAST translation method and the Passion Translation of the Bible.
• An informational communique to our Global Partners about software and IT updates (change can be painful). 
• An article in our mission magazine about a young man who was drafted to play big league baseball, but he walked away from it to invest his life in something far more important — sharing the Good News with people who have never heard!
• I also worked on applying for a grant to help cover the cost of contracting outside help to translate “A Translation for Translators.”
• And of course, I read and wrote a whole lot of email!

New opportunities to serve present themselves every day. Waiting for me now on my virtual desktop is the task of checking and editing the Spanish draft of a brief (100 page) history of Ethnos360. Just a few days ago, I was invited to interpret for our Global Forum in Colombia next year. Typically, this will involve translating a bunch of PowerPoint presentations, outlines and information sheets in preparation for the sessions.

This is all a part of making it possible for our global partners to function multilingually and internationally, working together to carry the light of God’s Word to those remote places where it has never before shined, bringing abundant life in Christ.

Before saying goodbye, can we share some prayer requests with you? 

• Eida is suffering tingling and numbing in her legs as well as hip pain. She’s receiving physical therapy for the symptoms, but the underlying cause needs to be diagnosed definitively. We actually signed her up for airline wheelchair service on our trip to Nova Scotia, which proved to be very helpful.
• We’ve been encouraged to get updated (used or refurbished) laptops with Windows 10 by the end of the year.
• Our old cars are needing some TLC. Who knows how much more life they have left in them.
• Thanks to my birthday, we are now eligible to move into our mission’s senior residence village in Florida. Living there would significantly lower our monthly living expenses while allowing us to continue our ministry full time, but… we feel very reluctant to move so far away from Art and Marlene and little Kaylene. We need to decide soon whether to make the move in 2020 or put it off another year.

As I write this letter, I’m listening to the songs we’ll be singing in worship band practice tonight. It reminds me of the joyful opportunity I enjoyed of singing and playing guitar with Esther in their church’s worship group.

Isn’t it wonderful to lift up our Savior’s name together in harmony? People from every tribe and tongue are going to make up a worldwide choir one day. Jesus has commissioned His church to work toward that end and we’re looking forward to it!

Thank you so much for your partnership with us — praying, giving and encouraging us so faithfully, since we were a couple of young marrieds.

Serving Him together,

Steve & Eida Irwin

Spanish Language Resources
Ethnos360.org
Cell: 408-515-1721
steve_irwin@ntm.org