Hi, friends!
I’m back after one of my longest trips to Indonesia. My trips usually run 7 weeks. But because Gale was able to come for two weeks while I was there, this trip was 11 weeks.
Some of you probably remember that our daughter, Rachel, also works with PBT. She worked for three years in Tanzania, but her health challenges (including the kinds of foods she can eat) made it difficult to live there any longer. After coming home, she stayed with us for a few months of recovery before moving two weeks ago to Dallas, where she is now working in the finance office at our organization’s headquarters.
After working through various challenges, she left for Dallas full of joy in anticipation of taking up her new work. And her work has gone well— including learning new accounting software. But she didn't anticipate that the place she had rented to live in would be filled with mildew and black mold. Rachel already struggles with health challenges that are like her mother's, and that includes a sensitivity to mold and mildew. She has cleaned as deeply as she can in her area, but the problem remains throughout the house. Recently our son, David, was on a business trip to Dallas and stopped in to visit Rachel. He said his eyes started watering as soon as he stepped into the place.
Please ask the Lord to quickly provide Rachel a good place to live that will not cause allergic reactions. Housing is very tight in the Duncanville area, south of Dallas. So finding a vacancy and getting a reasonable price are both difficult.
Since coming back, my first major job was to typeset our Plain Indonesian Translation NT (TSI) for edition 2.3. While I have prepared smaller books for publishing, I have never had to do a whole NT. I praise the Lord that the Lord has enabled me do a passable job just using humble open source software. The job is not quite finished. Please pray that my team and I will be able to catch any errors that linger in the layout. Through the generosity of a donor in another country, 9,500 copies of this edition will be sold at a subsidized price of $2.50, and 500 will be given away. Please pray that the Lord would do exactly like He says in his Word, that his Word would not return void, but would cut deep into the very soul and spirit of each reader, bringing a harvest of repentance and transformed lives.
Daniel, the office manager for our non-profit organization, called Albata, recently had the opportunity to attend a conference and prayer gatherings in the province of Sulawesi. He took copies of our NT along with him, some to give away, others to sell. He was disappointed that he was not able to get any time to present about our translation in a conference meeting, so he just prayed that God would work somehow. He had only given a place for our display. But the regional head of the Fellowship of Churches was there, and Daniel gave him a free copy of or NT. The next morning, that man was the speaker for the morning devotions. He preached from our TSI NT! He said something like, “When I read in this translation, the points I want to speak on just leap out of the page.” Another pastor there bought a copy. He spoke for the next morning’s devotions, again reading from and preaching from our NT. When things like this happen, we don’t need to give presentations. The Lord himself promotes his Word! Praise God! What a great answer to prayer.
The prayer request that I have mentioned again and again is that we in Albata would finish a high quality draft of the whole OT by sometime in 2020. It actually is beginning to look like we may meet that goal. But our further goal of getting all of the OT checked and ready for publication in 2022 seems almost impossible. There is a way out of this impossible situation, and it is something I hope you will join us in asking the Lord for.
Let me introduce the answer to my impossible situation by telling a little of what happened on my trip. Several things worked together so that I had a noon meal with three young single ladies in a large mall in Jakarta. Let me just say that they are from two different churches that already support Albata, and all three are from well-to-do families. All speak English fluently, and one is a graduate of Cornell in the USA, another with a degree from Australia. Two teach online courses. All had another wonderful thing in common: They all would like to help Albata meet the goal I just mentioned. So I asked them, “How can we find and involve more people just like you in completing our Bible translation?” The three young women turned out to be the experts God had appointed to answer that question! As a result of that meeting, I will create a new online course with the goal of training volunteers to help our translation team. Their advice included that the course needs to touch the listener’s hearts to motivate them to give their time, and I need to tell stories that will powerfully share our vision.
But, argh! I’m not good at telling stories! And this requires me to make some videos. This is NOT something that was on my want-to-do list! Please pray that God will enable me to make an interesting and engaging course that will be successful in reaching the hearts volunteers to be involved in a hands-on way in our Bible translation work. Please pray that we can manage the results so that the volunteers actually help, and not slow down our progress. There is something here that pertains to the Daily Bible Reading Podcast: I will not be able to release any new episodes until this course is set up and operating.
On May 6th, a family of 6 living in Surabaya, Java, split up and went to three different churches, and all set off suicide bombs that killed 25 people and injured others. Tension between Christians and Muslims has been increasing, and part of the reason are certain political events that have happened recently.
I tell about that to give a little perspective to another prayer request: We are adapting our current NT translation for use by Muslim background believers. This month we for the first time floated the Gospel of Mark at our web site. Because of the interests and needs of that group, the translation will be designed to be viewed in two columns together with the Greek text, and it will include many more footnotes showing how the source text has been translated.
I flew to visit with a consultant concerning that NT translation. Since it was an early flight, I ordered a taxi to pick me up at 3AM. The taxi driver was friendly and we started talking about the governor of Jakarta who was given a two-year jail sentence relating to his Christian beliefs. Then he said, “I’m a Christian myself. But I am originally from Aceh (a hotbed of radical Islam). Both my father and mother are devout Muslims and have even taken the required haji trip to Saudi Arabia.” He went on to describe how he was raised to be devout like his parents. He repeatedly went to a small church in the town, stole Bibles, and then burned them. He thinks he must have burned over 100 of them. But one day, a scrap with one verse didn’t burn up. He stuck the fragment in his pocket. It said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me.” Beginning with that night, the Lord began to speak to him. He stole another Bible, but this time didn’t burn it. Instead he took it home and secretly searched in it to find that verse. But after four months he still couldn’t locate it. In anger he went to the church on a Sunday morning and kicked at the door while people were singing. They let him in and demanded, “Where is this verse!” It only took them a minute to locate John 14:6. Then his question was, “Who is the person who said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life?’” The answer was, “That’s Jesus.” “Then I want to follow him,” he said.
But he didn’t tell his parents. He left home. But after working in other cities for a few years, he went back home to tell his parents. He wanted to tell them about his conversion before he got baptized. His parents’ response was what might be expected. A huge argument erupted. He was stabbed twice in the back. Then someone took a huge rock and cracked his skull with it. When he came to, his body had been thrown out in the jungle. (At this point, still on the way to the airport, he took my hand and placed it on his head, so that I could feel the indentation in his skull.)
Then I said, “Your story is almost like the man who is working with me to create a new New Testament translation for Muslim background believers in Indonesia. His name is ___ (we’ll call him Zack today), He’s also from Aceh. He also was almost killed when he believed in Christ because of reading a Bible.” Then the taxi driver said, “Oh, Zack! Is he real short?” And I said Yes.
There are around 20,000 Bluebird taxi drivers in Jakarta. What are the chances that I would be picked up by a driver who had met Zack two months earlier? And this happened on the day I was traveling to meet a consultant for the special NT translation being prepared for such people!
I want to repeat and hopefully simplify a couple of announcements I made in my News from Jakarta post one month ago. (That was a text only post, not a podcast. I recorded a podcast, but experienced a software meltdown making it so that I couldn’t edit my recording.)
- If you access the Daily Bible Reading podcasts via the Devotional Content page inside the YouVersion app, then I want you to be aware that the search string encoded in the Podcast Choices link is often not working well. Try adding the letter p to the front of that search string, or if you search for podcast released this year, add the letter y to the front of that search string.
- The same is true for the DBR website as well. If you just search for a day number 130, (and search without any other characters from the file name) you will also find all the podcasts that include Psalm 130 as well. It is better to add a few more letters matching the file name of the series you want to listen to, in order for your desired podcast to come up on the top of the results.
May the Lord bless you 'real good'!
