I will never forget that young mother’s prayer during night class!

We were in the last stages of the Bible translation program, where for twenty years Jo and I had been called Tehtikwyj and Prejaka by the thousand-plus Canela villagers. Two dozen Canela men and women surrounded me, sitting on logs, heads bowed in prayer. We had sung hymns set to Canela indigenous music patterns, and in a few minutes, would read and talk about a new draft of a chapter of the Bible.

Prayer Time
Now, it was time to pray. First, I heard prayers asking God to heal sick children, for a good crop, and for help to find a lost bush knife. Then a young mother prayed:

“Great Father in the Sky,” she began. “I want to thank You for sending our brother Prejaka, and our sister Tehtikwyj, to us so long ago when I was just a baby. First, they taught us to read our own language. Then, they worked with us to translate Your Words into it. Now we can read Your Letter to us. Now we are discovering that You love us very much. Now we are learning how we can live to please you. Please help them to finish Your Book soon.”

Prayer for Donors
Then came the unforgettable part that brought tears to my eyes.

“I also want to thank You for all Prejaka and Tehtikwyj’s friends far away in their own country. For all these years, their friends didn’t forget them, but kept sending them money. They know that our brother and sister don’t have a food garden here as we do. Their faraway friends send them money so they can buy food and gas for their truck. They send this money, not because of friendship, but because they are all part of Your family, Great Father.

“They have money and maybe they see a new enamel plate or a shiny spoon and ask themselves, ‘Should I buy this for my family?’ But then, they decide not to buy anything, but instead, they send the money to our brother and sister so they can live here and make the books of Your Word.

“And they sure chose right because Your Word is so much better than a new spoon and more valuable than even an enamel plate. As a reward, give these faraway brothers and sisters lots of healthy children; make their gardens grow well, and keep them from getting sick. Amen. “

What’s Happening Today
Bible translation programs are going on in thousands of languages around the world right now. Translation teams have completed programs in hundreds of languages in the last ten years. So, it is very likely that while you are reading this column:

• Somewhere in the world, someone is reading or hearing the Word of God in their own language for the first time.
• Somewhere, Jesus is showing the Great Father to someone who has only recently heard about Him.
• Somewhere, the Holy Spirit is inspiring new believers to thank God for His Word, to thank Him for those who bring His Word and to ask Him to bless those who send the money that makes it possible.
• Somewhere, God blesses donors to Bible translation and cross-cultural missions as He answers prayers by new believers such as that young Canela mother.

To those of you who give to Bible translation and cross-cultural missions, someone who you will not meet until eternity, could be asking God to bless you because, as that young Canela mother said,
“You sure chose right.”

A Life-Long Commitment

“You guys are so fortunate! You don’t even know how blessed you are!” Hearing our Bible translating colleagues in Brazil telling us this surprised us. What are they talking about? we wondered.

The Report
We had just reported at a conference on our first year’s work with the Canela people. “The Canelas gave us Canela names and adopted us into their families,” we said. “They are happy to help us learn their language, and the chief keeps urging us to invent a way of writing Canela so we can teach people to read their language. People keep volunteering to help us.”

The Complaints
We discovered that many of our friends struggled to be accepted by their villagers. Some couldn’t find anyone willing to help them learn the language. Others had made learn-to-read booklets but found no one who had any interest in learning to read.

Jo and I had no idea why God blessed our work among the Canela in such a startlingly obvious way.

The Letter
Then, one day, we received a letter from Belfast. A man named Joe explained it all:

“Dear Brother Jack and Sister Josephine,
I just heard that you are among the Canela and plan to translate God’s Word for them. While on an evangelizing trip in Brazil, our team came upon a village that was not on our map. We tried to talk with the people, but we could not understand each other. They were such a fierce-looking group, with spears and clubs, we didn’t dare stay the night with them. So, we travelled on. Later I discovered that they were called the Canela.

The Answer
He went on to tell us a bit more about himself, and we were astonished to learn that God had moved him to start praying for the Canela people ten years before my wife and I were even born.

He continued to pray, without ever receiving any further information about the Canela, for forty years until Jo and I arrived as thirty-year-old missionaries. That’s when he wrote his letter.

He then prayed faithfully for another twenty-two years until we published a partial Bible translated into Canela, and Jesus planted His Church among the Canela people. Then, after Joe the Irishman had prayed for sixty-two years, the Lord took him Home, no doubt, to his exceeding great reward.

The Prayer Project
Two years after Jo and I left Brazil, we spoke at a conference in Suriname, so we took the opportunity to cross the border into Brazil to visit the Canela. Sadly, it was planting season, and about two-thirds of the people were away in their fields.

We walked from house to house, greeting our friends and taking pictures of individuals, couples, families, and extended families. We carefully recorded the names of each person on the photo and how they were related to the others.

When we returned home, we printed out the four hundred pictures and the names. Then, during the rest of that year, we spoke at scores of recruiting and fund-raising meetings. First, I told the story of Joe, the Irishman and his sixty-two years of praying. I then said, “If any of you here would commit to pray every day for a Canela man, woman or child by name and picture, come and see us after the meeting.”

I warned them that, just as Joe had prayed “in the dark” with no updated information, so they too would not have any updates. Even so, after a few months, four hundred individual prayer warriors across North America had volunteered to pray daily for the Canelas on the pictures.

The Rest of the Story
Last week I received a note from a prayer partner who started praying nearly forty years ago for a Canela girl and still prays daily for her by picture and name. She prayed as she visualized her Canela girl becoming a teenager, marrying, having children and now, as a grandma.

God continues to bless his Word, which the Canelas read and follow. As a result, the Church among the Canela continues to grow.

Planting His Church among the Canela is God’s work, but He invites His people to be involved. He called Joe from Belfast to pray for over sixty years. God called my wife and me to spend thirty-three years of our lives in training, linguistic research, teaching, and translation for the Canelas. He called scores of others to give and to pray.

God has partially rewarded Jo and me by letting us see the results of our work. Those praying “in the dark” will see the results and receive God’s full reward in eternity.

Suffering? A Part of God’s Plan?
The hopeful news is that we are nearing the end of the lockdowns and isolation to safeguard us during the current pandemic. All these stringent measures are stressful to all of us. Our North American culture not only encourages us to avoid pain, stress, and suffering of any kind, it also provides many ways of escaping unpleasantness. No wonder this past year drug and alcohol abuse increased noticeably. Other evidence from opiate use, divorce and abortion are also on the rise.

We who are Christians are children of our own culture. We too are tempted to evade troubles and suffering.

We need to remember that Jesus promised that we, as His followers, would have trouble in this world. But he also told us, “Cheer up; I have overcome the world.”

As believers, therefore, we need to realize that we must not avoid trouble and suffering but welcome it. Our loving heavenly Father works out even our suffering to result in good for us.

We sometimes overlook the list of commands in Romans 12: “Do not lack in zeal. Keep your spiritual fervour. Serve the Lord. Be joyful in hope. Be faithful in prayer. Share with other believers who are in need. Practice hospitality.”

We pat ourselves on the back as we check off these seven commands. But there is one more: Be patient in affliction. Huh? Say what? Affliction? Suffering? No way!

Yes, says God. No avoiding trouble. No making yourself feel better with entertainment or drugs. No trying to make it go away faster. Be patient and endure.

Yes, Jo and I Suffered
For more than twenty years, my wife and I immersed ourselves deeply in the critical ministry of translating God’s Word for the Canela people. We volunteered service for God fully expecting Him to provide us with all the health, abilities, and finances we needed and to smooth the way to accomplish this complicated task efficiently and as soon as possible. Not so! Absolutely not so! Our experience was the opposite.

We endured ill health, lacked many abilities, were consistently under-financed. Obstacles of every sort filled our way. Yes, we suffered. I am currently writing the memoir of those decades and Jo and I joked this morning, that we could fill the entire book just with stories of the vehicles that let us down with mechanical troubles at the most inconvenient and even dangerous times.

Jo and I had to learn that not just human efficiency, but also suffering is part of God’s plan. We had calculated it would take twelve to fifteen years in Brazil to complete the research, literacy teaching, and translation work, but took twenty-two years!

God’s Encouragement in Trouble
If it were not for God encouraging us, I would indeed have given up for good. But texts such as “If we suffer, we shall also reign with him” helped us hang in there.  (2 Tim. 2:12)
“We glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance, character and hope that does not put us to shame.” (Rom. 5: 3-4)
“We are co-heirs with Christ: if indeed we share in his sufferings so that we may also share in his glory.” (Rom. 8:17)
“If you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. (1 Pet. 2:20)

We also took much comfort in the fact that Christ suffered physical pain for us and therefore could strengthen us to endure it. (1 Pet. 4:1). And that we can know Jesus and “the fellowship of his sufferings” (Philippians 3:10). And to “Rejoice in my sufferings, to fill up what is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the (Canela) church.” (Col. 1:24).

The Hardest Part
Some God-haters manipulated the government to exile Jo and me and our colleagues

Leaving Canela land, exiled for nearly six years.

from the villages where we ministered. When we got our orders to leave, we took courage from Psalm 37:7 “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; do not fret when people succeed in their ways when they carry out their wicked schemes.” I’m sorry to say we did not wait patiently those long five years and eight months.

What hurt us the most was that being in exile delayed the time the Canelas would finally get God’s Word to read in their own language. Personal suffering was one thing, but the souls of the Canelas? How could all this delay be God’s plan?

The hard lesson we had to learn was that delays are part of our Eternal God’s plan. He has His own timetable. When God’s Word finally arrived in their language, the Canelas were eager to read it and many became ardent Jesus-followers. Since then, a whole generation of Canelas have been turning to follow Jesus.