Travelin’ Miles: Don’t Stop Praying!
Dear Friends and family, Thank you VERY much for your prayers this last month. Please DON’T STOP PRAYING!
Our new International Service Center in Dallas is now officially under construction. At our GROUNDBREAKING on March 7 we celebrated with many friends and with tears of joy as we turned over the first soil to begin building the first real home of Pioneer Bible Translators – our launching pad from which we will send forth many missionaries with the passionate vision of seeing lives transformed through God’s Word in every language on the planet!
As part of the GROUNDBREAKING celebration we passed out stakes and sharpies to everyone, and asked them to write a special blessing or a prayer or a favorite verse on the stake, and to hammer it in the ground around the roped-off perimeter of our future building, as a way of articulating a collective prayer as we build and work. We are saving those stakes, varnishing them, and using them in different meaningful ways around the landscaping on the property.
After the ceremony my son Bobby came up to me and gave me a meaning-laced hug and then he showed me his stake which he was going to hammer into the ground. It said, “Don’t stop praying” -- which brought tears to my eyes! Those of you who have walked with our family through the last few years will know that those words were the last words John Relyea said before he died four years ago. They have been our battle cry, motivating us and inspiring us in so many ways. Bobby’s thought of writing THAT reminder on his stake meant so much to me. I “lost it” right there under the cedar trees.
We are SO grateful for your constant prayers for our Bible translation ministry. This last month we’ve been “travelin’ miles” – MANY of them! I have spoken at 5 of the 12 Perspectives classes at which I am scheduled to share about world missions – the task remaining, and how to build bridges of love to unreached peoples. Please don’t stop praying; I have 7 more classes to speak at in different places in the next few weeks. Pray that God will link me up with future GOERS and SENDERS and INTERCESSORS.
Thank you for your prayers for Nathan. He has truly been in the “uttermost part of the earth.” (Read his harrowing account of part of his travels below.) He reports that the software that he went to test in a cluster project in the jungles of PNG is working. There were some complicated bugs that surfaced while he was there. With only one more day left in the village, he sent a radio message asking me to pray that he could solve these. I emailed several people to pray for this. He told me after he arrived back in the U.S. that the very next morning he woke up and was lying there under his mosquito net – and realized that he JUST KNEW the answer to the problem. An epiphany sort of thing. God DOES answer our prayers. Don’t stop praying!
The United Bible Societies’ software development team which Nathan heads up is on home stretch in developing and testing a new release of their big software package for Bible translators called Paratext. Please pray with us that the team will be able to identify and solve ALL MAJOR ISSUES in the next 4 weeks. Paratext 7.0 is scheduled to be released in June at a Bible Societies meeting in Thailand, and then made available to Bible translators around the world.
Don’t stop praying!
Marsha(for Nathan and our whole clan)
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