Storm!!!!

Greetings everyone! Just a quick update to let you know the workshops are still going well, and we are still working on Bible studies and translation.

Saturday night I saw the hand of God displayed in a mighty way: Lightning!!! I have always loved watching lightning, but I got to see it up close and personal that night.

It started with rain around 11:00, then the wind started to pick up. Pretty soon it was the heaviest drencher I have ever heard, and the wind was whipping so strong, that every where in my room was getting dampened. My puppy began to cry, and I ran out to rescue the bunny from certain death by drowning... It was amazing how quickly the yard was flooding!

Sometime shortly after 12:00, I had gotten up again to see if I had unplugged something, but just as I came out of my door, I was stopped in my tracks by an incredible flash and a tremendous crash of thunder. I watched, thunderstruck, as the lightning (that hit my phone antenna) travelled down the wire, burst the phone apart, then leapt across the table to fry the satellite modem. Finally, it sent a burst a flame out of the outlet in my room. I was rather startled, but was soon curled up in bed, sleeping for the few hours left of the night.

The next morning, I was surprised to discover it had rained five inches in about 2 to 2 1/2 hours. My phone was obviously dead, as well as the internet, but everything else was okay. I am thankful that it was not the new internet system but the old modem that had been repaired many times anyway.

I am blessed by God's protection and the display of His mighty power! Please be praying for the local farmers. We are having a lot of rain when it should be dry, so they are having trouble preparing their fields to plant vital food to meet the needs of their families.

Also, please be in prayer as we are working on getting the new (used but new to us) satellite dish installed. We are having some difficulties with getting all the parts working. We bought a really inexpensive one at first, but it didn't work at all. After finding another used system, we discovered that part of it is not functioning, so we are trying to figure out what to do next.

God is good!

It is done!

Thanks be to God for His great mercy and love which He has poured down upon us! In the last seven weeks, the entire New Testament was read from beginning to end, then replayed from beginning to end. Last Wednesday at noon, we finished up the last of the recording, finishing by recording two chapters over because of the cricket noise! It was quite a challenge to accomplish a professional quality recording in the middle of the jungle! The parrots and other birds gave us trouble by day, and crickets, geckos, and locusts gave trouble by night. Those things, along with numerous power outages, readers with sore throats, language barriers (the technicians spoke Spanish), seminars, and teams made the whole project a challenge. Add to that the fact that most of the readers had not read in their own language before, and you begin to catch a glimpse of the obstacles that the enemy placed in our path, but the Lord was, of course, greater than all of those things!

We are so blessed by each one that gave their best efforts to help make the recording possible, from the readers, to the monitors, to the cooks, to the technicians that came from Guatemala, to the people in Guatemala that worked in the office, to the people we may never meet in the States who typed the text, raised the funds, and took care of many other details!

Elvina, Clifford, and I are now getting things back together and pressing on with workshops, Bible study writing, and translating, all of which we kept up during the recording, but not as effectively as we would have liked. Please pray for us as we continue on and walk the path that God has placed before us!