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I know, it's been a looong time since you've heard from us! The longer it gets the harder it is to summarize all that has happened. I started writing this back in June, but did what I've never done, and just gave up and procrastinated for a few more months! But yesterday at church a little girl blessed my socks off and inspired me to communicate again. Little Lyla, all of about 8 years old, raised $272 in a garage sale, then yesterday timidly approached me with a fat envelop, to support "all the wonderful work you do in Bible Translation!" So, time to snap out of it and share some of that wonderful stuff... Sorry, a bit long, but make sure you scroll down to the bottom!
2021 Highlights
I'm still with Seed Company, working to support Bible translation work in 30-80 languages of South Asia (it varies by the month, and is a number now shrinking--see further below):
- In April, after many Covid delays, the Savias NT was dedicated. Among the 900,000 Savias speakers, many thousands have decided to follow Jesus in recent years and are rejoicing to have the NT.
- The Orjay NT was sent to the press in March, but with Covid lockdowns and supply chain hurdles it couldn't be printed. The team finally moved the printing to a different country, and after waiting several months in the long queue of Bibles being printed, the NT was delivered to the community a few weeks ago and was dedicated last week.
- The Ortag NT was sent to the press along with Orjay, and should get its turn in a few weeks.
- The Diama and Sagu translations have just completed all of their final checks and are now being typeset. Working in the same cluster project with these two, the Dakon team is preparing for final checks of their last two books, with plans for a NT dedication by Christmas.
- Many of my projects are developing oral Bible stories, either as a precursor to written translation, or as a supplement to it. This year 28 distinct languages completed an average of 50 Bible stories each, a kind of oral panorama of the Bible. Quarter after quarter I receive reports from these projects that are mind-blowing: as people encounter God's Word in oral form, often hearing about Jesus for the first time, people are healed and relationships are restored; others are reconciled to God; some turn from lives that are both harmful to themselves and destructive to their loved ones. Testimony after testimony, God is transforming lives as people encounter Him through His Word.
One of my side passions with Bible translation is to experiment with various strategies that might speed up or enhance the work in some way. This year I've gotten to play a lot, especially with a cool new piece of software that helps translators adapt from one language to another closely related one:
- One of the translators in the Bart language can understand most of Branchu, where we worked for many years and where the full Bible is getting ready for printing now, so using the Branchu source text he was able to produce a first draft 2-3 times faster than normal, and because of the high quality output the subsequent checking and revision stages were more like 3-5 times faster. They are now moving ahead to do this for the whole OT.
- In the past three weeks I helped get 4 new translations started using this same adaptation tool: two are for languages with no Scripture yet, and two are Old Testaments.
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A New Job!
In July I started a new part-time job! As a 40% assignment with Seed Company I'm assigned to a partner organization to manage the roll-out of a new project management tool for Bible translation projects among partner organizations globally. Rev79 is a tool that began in India by my primary partner there to help manage their growing number of Bible translations. From a few dozen initial project leaders a few years ago, now there are around 300 using the App and my job is to help scale that up to 900 in the next 12 months.
In order to manage the increased load I am handing over several of my current projects to a colleague, so my current portfolio is now down to the size it was in my second year. I get to focus on the development of new projects, which I love, while not getting bogged down in their maintenance, which is not my favorite thing. A nice change!
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The vision of the tool, and the reason why I'm significantly increasing my work load to be part of this, is to enhance the capabilities of the worldwide Bible translation workforce, leading to more effectiveness and greater transformation.
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2021 Highlights on the Homefront
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**August 6 was one of those lifetime highlights that is hard to express: our son Caleb married the beautiful and kind Amanda Matley in the most beautiful wedding ever! We couldn't be more proud as parents--a passionate, gentle-hearted Jesus lover marrying his kindred spirit. We are as thrilled to welcome a daughter as Luke and Josh are to welcome a sister. The world needs more like Caleb and Amanda ;-)
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**The day after the wedding Josh hopped in his VW Golf and road-tripped back to Nashville to start a new job with WeFunder, a very cool startup company that seeks to bring the benefits of venture capital to both entrepreneurs and mom and pop investors.
**For Luke, Caleb's marriage rendered him homeless, so he hopped on a plane and spent the next 3+ weeks in Europe, shooting UTMB, the "Olympics" of ultra trail running (100+ miles around Mount Blanc!), and generally having an exhausting fun time blending work--photography and documentary film producing--and play.
**This spring we had the sheer joy of raising 7 amazingly cute little puppies, our newest little side hustle. Let us know if you want to get on the list for Maya's next litter!
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