Progress Report on the Tala-Andig Translation

A HUGE PRAISE POINT:

COL 4 – 1 THESS 5:11 IS COMPLETED!!

Our goal is to complete 30 verses per week, which includes about 10 hours of study, working many hours on skype each week with our translation team, doing a thorough content check to make sure that no information is missing….and many other things. It is heavy-going and we are spending about 8-10 hours in the office each day, but it is very rewarding!

Our translation team in Lapoc are feeling the push too and are working long hours. In the picture above you can see Nanah’s smiling face on one of our skype calls earlier this week. She puts extensive time in with us on skype helping us to translate and she also takes each chapter when we have finished working on it and she checks it with other people in Lapoc to make sure it is readable and easily comprehended. Some days she starts at 7 am and this is a big commitment on her part as she has 4 children to care for and she is also involved in teaching scripture in the schools on a Thursday and in Women’s Ministry as well. It helps her a lot that her husband Danny is supportive and she has a wonderful mother and sister who willingly help her with babysitting when this is needed.

Ryan and Sarah – although new on the translation team – have been spending hours with Nanah, watching how she checks the translation with others and listening to us as well while we translate on skype. Ryan says that he is beginning to feel very interested and excited in the translation! Although he has done 6 years of training in university and in seminary preparing to be a Bible translator, it is only just now starting to feel ‘real’ to him and the Lord is awakening a new passion in his heart for doing translation work. Sarah is so supportive of him and is also putting time into learning translation principles so she can help her husband all she can.

 TRANSLATION PRAYER POINTS

 ·       * Pray for our satellite internet signal in Lapoc to always be strong as sometimes the signal is weak and this can prevent us from accessing the help we need.  

·       * Pray that we will finish 1 Thess 5:12 – 1 Tim 3 by the end of Feb.

·       * Pray for Nanah that she will constantly find all the strength and joy she needs in the Lord.

·       * Pray for Ryan and Sarah as they go through the adjustments of being newlyweds, expecting their first baby and a huge new learning curve as they fit into the translation team.

·       * Pray for us as we are getting less sleep than we would like but it is worth it.  Pray that we will continue to meet our goals of 30 verses completed each week and pray for many hours each day of uninterrupted time so we can work efficiently.

We feel very privileged to have been entrusted with this precious work by our Lord and we are very excited as we see the Tala-Andig scriptures becoming a reality!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Prayer and Praise

Jubab is coming home!

The team is due to arrive at the Brisbane airport this morning. They left Hungary yesterday and have been enroute now for almost 24 hours already. Please pray for him during this week as they debrief at Tewantin. 

 Pray for us

as we translate

1 Thessalonians. We are up to

chapter 2 and hope to get chapter

2 and 3 completed by the end

of this week, Jan, 23^rd.

  Praise God for Jubab’s wonderful time in Hungary. 

Pray that we will have strength this week for long hours translating.

We praise God for our tickets bought this week for our trip to the Philippines in April!

Pray that we will have distraction free time this year so that we can  translate consistently. 
 

My Sister Jennifer's Story

Amazing News!!!!!!  Hundreds of prayers and cryings out to the Lord answered suddenly in His perfect timing in one afternoon!!!!!!!!!!

This is my sister Jennifer’s story but her story is intertwined with mine (Debbie’s) so I share this as OUR story.

For years, I have seen my sister struggle with longing to find her birth mother.

 I have held her many time while she sobbed and even screamed with the pain of her baby memories of a mother who walked away from her and the questions of WHY, WHY, WHY???? She was 2 years old when she last saw her birth mother.

This picture is of my sister Jennifer with her birth Mum on her second birthday while she was still in the orphanage before we adopted her.

This week, Jennifer and her son Billy who is 11, are visiting us here in Ballina and on Tuesday, Jan.6, 2015, I was on the internet looking for Kings FilAm home in Olongapo so I could show Jennifer because this was the orphanage that she had been in. And when I did the search, I found the following:

“OUR SEARCH FOR JENNIFER NAPOD (which is Jennifer’s birth name):

It felt so surreal to read the whole account of Jennifer’s birth family and their search for her, and it didn’t take long to find phone numbers, photos, you tube videos, contact details……of Jen’s birth family and by midnight that evening, Jen was talking on skype with her sisters and her birth mother and ALL of us – Jennifer’s birth family, Jennifer, Billy, Paul and I – were all sobbing. It was so emotional, so overwhelming, SOOOOOO WONDERFUL!!!!

It turns out that Jen’s birth mother has been looking for her for almost 35 years, even hired private investigators….to no avail, and she has had numerous reoccurring dreams of Jennifer standing with outstretched arms reaching out to her. Finally the whole story is unravelling and the oh so many questions in Jennifer’s heart are being answered and the tears that are falling now are not bitter but healing.

I can’t tell you how much it has broken my heart over this last day or so to hear my sister saying to her birth Mum on skype, “Mama why did you leave me? I have been so lonely for you all these years……” And both of them sobbing and sobbing as her Mama has shared her life’s story. The beautiful thing is that Jennifer is soooooo much like her birth Mum and her sisters. They do the same things, they laugh the same and Jennifer looks like her Mama…..

The next step is to meet them in person and feel all that love and family in person!  Pray that this will be able to happen in about March. Jennifer and her two children (or maybe just Billy if Mariah has to start Uni) are hoping to make it to Hawaii for her sister’s birthday and for a big family reunion!

Jennifer has even discovered that her birth mother’s sister lives here in Australia! So close all these years!!

Not only does it melt our hearts (Paul’s and mine) to have our sister’s birth family as part of our family now and to see Jennifer connecting so beautifully with all of them, but it makes us cry to see how much this means to Jennifer’s children. Billy came up to Paul yesterday and hugged him and said, “I want to say thanks so much Uncle Paul that you and Aunty Debbie helped us to find Mummy’s Mum and my Grandma.”  His sister Mariah, 17 years old, who is in Sydney, heard the news and went to her Dad almost beside herself saying, “DAD!!! I HAVE THE MOST AMAZING NEWS!!! I HAVE OTHER COUSINS……I HAVE ANOTHER GRANDMA!!!!!”

God is our HEALER. And He knows how much healing my little sister’s heart needs. She has been on a very hard journey and many times she has refused to listen to Him, but as she told me a couple of days ago (before we found her birth mother), “God has never let go of me……”

Half the world away, in America, a mother, two sisters and two brothers are thanking God that their search is over and they have found their daughter and sister who they have spent years looking for.

And here in our little home in Ballina, is one beautiful girl whose heart’s questions have finally been answered; whose jagged  emotional wounds because of a mother who she remembers ‘walking away’, are well on the way now to being healed;  who felt such difficulty before ‘connecting’ with others, is now connecting.

There is still a long journey ahead, still a lot of hurts to heal…..but GOD keeps continuing the work that He began and HE WILL COMPLETE IT!!! Praise God!!!

And here is one happy sister – me – because I just want my sister to be happy.