Out of brokenness, God is doing something new…

In 2015 one of our two mother-tongue translators had to step down from the team due to a moral issue.

This sent shock waves through our team and significantly slowed down our progress in translation as we supported this family. Many hours were spent listening to outpourings of pain, seeking good counsel and praying with and for our friends. We also enlisted the prayers of close friends and supporters. How could our Father work through this seeming disaster? Slowly he brought healing and restoration to this broken marriage through a deep work in our friends’ hearts and lives.

Each morning in our team devotions, we saw God speak into their lives through his Word, transforming bitterness to forgiveness, and pain to slowly growing trust. At the same time we began to recruit a replacement translator.

Eighteen months later we can look back and recognise the hand of God at work, growing and enriching our friends and their marriage, and also providing a new translator.

This young man is a respected peer among the younger church leaders who are the ones needing to take ownership of the translation and begin using it in their churches. His influence is already being felt among them; there is a growing interest and commitment to learning to read their own language well enough to read in public, and to using a new (for them) approach of studying the Scriptures in small groups.

We praise God for his faithfulness in answering many prayers to bring healing, restoration and transformation in our friends’ lives, and to bring a new impetus to the ongoing work of seeing his Word available to this language group.

This story is from Wycliffe Today – July 2017 Edition

About the Author: Mark & Anne, Translation Advisors (Asia)