Reasons to Celebrate

Over the next few months, we want to give you a glimpse of work that’s going on through unfoldingWord (the organization we are assigned to work with) in different regions of the world. This month’s highlight is:

South Asia

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In March we had the privilege of being able to watch (from afar) as 15 communities in South Asia received the first copies of the New Testament in their language. We heard stories of how Christ had transformed the lives of the translators, bringing them out of darkness and despair, and of their joy at now being able to bring the same hope they had found to the rest of their communities.

Many stories reminded us of the necessity of translation in a world where it sometimes seems like everyone understands at least one of the world’s major languages. We heard about an isolated region where formal education is limited and even the pastors often did not know words in the text they were preaching from. Using scriptures in the national language, they had to guess or make up interpretations. Those pastors can now preach from the Bible in their own language and the language of their congregations.

We heard from a Christian who moved from one region of the country to another to spread the gospel. She had always believed that everyone in that region spoke the national language alongside their mother-tongue. To her great surprise, she discovered upon arrival that millions did not. She began working to coordinate and lead translation teams. In March, she celebrated the successful completion of the New Testament translation into four languages with speakers from each.

Over 16 million more people now have the hope of the New Testament available in their language for the first time thanks to the hard work of local translators and the tools unfoldingWord is developing.

Scripture Celebrations

Next week Wycliffe will be celebrating another eight languages that now have scripture as well. We invite you to join the celebration Wednesday May 26 at 2pm Eastern time. Languages from around the world—Africa, Asia, and the Americas, ranging in population from 5,000 speakers to nearly a million—now have scripture that they didn’t have before. That’s a reason to celebrate! RSVP to join the festivities and find fun translation activities and international recipes at www.wycliffe.org/celebrate

Meanwhile, back in North Carolina…

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We’re adjusting to life with a new baby and being a family of five. We’ve celebrated six years with Mira and one month with Anastasia. Anastasia is growing well, and her older siblings can’t get enough of her, but are still adjusting to Mommy’s time being spread more thinly. Please pray that our family would embrace joy in this season (and that we’d get enough rest!)

Benjamin continues to work on developing resources for translating Exodus from his office at home. One of the more interesting things I have done recently is create an article for our key terms resource. I kept seeing “I am Yahweh” in the text and knew we needed to address it somehow. I researched where and how it appeared through scripture and spent time in some commentaries to try to get a good idea of what is going on when that appears. Here is what I ended up with:

The statement “I am Yahweh” is used to mark out a command, historical event, promise, or prophecy as something that is particularly important, as something that happened by Yahweh’s power, or as something that will happen regardless of circumstances. This certainty is based on Yahweh’s character and strength as the all-powerful ruler over all things. At the same time, the statement is used to give Yahweh’s people understanding of who he is and what his name means. By reflecting on the command, historical event, promise, or prophecy so marked, the listener will understand more of who Yahweh is. Leviticus 11:44–45 makes it clear that by following the holiness laws that follow the people will become holy like Yahweh.

Now to link to all 214 occurrences! This will enable our resources to display information each place it appears both when translators are translating and when teams are checking the translated text. Once our partner networks get to a portion of scripture containing an “I am Yahweh” statement they will translate this article as needed. (For instance: some of our Russian partners who speak English will translate it into Russian; then their Roma partners who speak Russian can reference it when working on the Roma translation—more about that project next month.)