…Catching Up
The past two months have been so much fun working with the OBT School here in South Africa, as you can see from the photo! We had a fun day where we were asked to dress up as our favorite movie character. I don’t know what exactly I was thinking when I pulled out the denim jeans and white tee shirt look, other than I just didn’t have any other ideas, so if you guessed Grease, or any James Dean character, you’re probably right! I was going for James Dean because I was reminded of the huge mural that I saw as a child whenever my family would go to Roslyn, Washington for holiday. I always thought that it was such an iconic look, even though I never even watched a James Dean movie before (LOL). If you have any recommendations for movies featuring the actor James Dean, let me know… I still haven’t seen a single one!
OBT Outreach!
I have been getting really excited to see what our OBT outreach is going to look like in the nation of Malawi, where we will be going for the next three months, from December to March. We still need to purchase plane tickets and get our short-term visas figured out, but I am sure that the Lord has really good plans for us in this nation. I hope that every single one of the students in the OBT school will feel prepared to go on this incredible trip to help translate portions of Scripture, and other OBT resources for the mother tongue languages in Malawi. We will have a lot of work to do while we are there, but this is the first time making contact with most of the people that we are going to be working with there. We are super excited to see how God moves through our prayers and active steps of simple obedience to go and share His Word with others!
To give a quick snapshot of our outreach plans, and help to explain how you can be partnering with us in prayer, I will just share our goals and prayer points below:
Points of focus for our time in Malawi:
- Translating OBT training resources into Chichewa and Tumbuka – the local trade languages.
- Providing an OBT Workshop for local pastors and mother-tongue language speakers who want to learn how to translate the Bible orally within their communities.
- Surveying local languages to get a better understanding of which languages are spoken, by whom, and which ones still need translation for the sake of future OBT ministry opportunities.
- Facilitating OBT projects within the local language communities and seeing how we can serve them best as they get started with their own translation work.
As we are getting ready to go on outreach, we have decided to put these points of focus ahead of us for the time we will spend on the ground, however, these are just guide posts for our team to look towards as we go. I would probably expect that the majority of our time spent on outreach will be in service to the local communities and finding out how we can best prepare for future outreaches with OBT ministry, and even finding out what are the other needs that these communities have that we might be able to help with such as farming/agricultural training, water filtration projects, trauma healing/counseling, etc… We will not know for sure what God will want to do on the ground until we are able to see in-person what He is doing in the lives of Malawians already, and how can we partner with what God is already doing to see truth and transformation come in through the Word of God in the local mother-tongue languages. Please pray for us that God will give us a lot of wisdom and encouragement throughout this time in Malawi, and pray for the local communities to be raised up for the task ahead. The whole process of OBT is mother-tongue speaker-centered, so we are praying that the local peoples will be the ones to take complete ownership of this ministry and we will just be coming alonside to support and nuture them as they grow into this role of facilitator and translator for their own Bible translation work. Praise God!
We truthfully believe that the Gospel, the Word of God, is enough for the nations to come to the knowledge of Christ and be transformed by the work of the Holy Spirit in them. God has been growing our understanding of His vision and plans for the future with our OBT ministry here in South Africa, and I am so excited to be able to see what He will do over these next few years in the nations of Africa. May God truly come to meet with us in the nations and may we find Him in the fields, wherever we go. I am so blessed and so entirely grateful to be a part of what God is doing here in South Africa and in the nations of Africa. Please continue in prayer and I encourage you to fast from food for the work of Bible translation in the nations to continue to multiply exponentially over these next few years leading up to our goal of seeing all languages have access to at least portions of the Bible by the year 2033. We are praying that we will be the generation to see the Lord come back to a spotless bride, and with all the nations giving glory to Jesus, saying “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” Until then, we continue on in our faith, crying out to God for His complete redemption in every language, tribe, people, and nation. God bless all who read this message now, and may you continue faithfully in prayer for these languages, and all “ethnos,” who do not have access to the Word of God in their mother-tongue.
If you would like to join us on WhatsApp to hear more about what we are doing in OBT and Fire & Fragrance, South Africa, please click the link below:
Until next time!
🙂
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