Welcome to the InSights & OutBursts Fall Restart
Three weeks ago, on Thursday, August 10, our family celebrated a major milestone, the 32nd Anniversary of Canela Bible Day in 1990. Yes, that was the day when Jo and I led a ceremonial dedication and distribution of the newly published Canela partial Bible God had used us to translate.
Feasting, singing and dancing for the whole village, after receiving the Bible in Canela.
In 1958, thirty-two years before we celebrated that first Canela Bible Day, God was already at work on their behalf. Way back then He motivated Wycliffe in Brazil to search for tribal groups whose languages were so different from others that they needed a Bible translation program. Linguistic surveyors found the Canela people whose language was weirdly distinct, the culture strong, and the villages very isolated—two days walk through the forest from the nearest Brazilian town. So, the Canela group was put on the waiting list.
God led Jo and me to meet. That same year, 1958, we were in our first year of Bible School in Calgary. We had our first date, walking in the cemetery across the street from the school, the only traffic-free place and yet had walkways without snow.
Jo and I finished our Bible training, God led us to marry, and we spent many months training in linguistics and Bible translation techniques in between pastoring a church for three years and having our three daughters.
We arrived in Brazil in December 1966 with two preschoolers and a four-month-old baby. There we plunged into studying Portuguese, learning Brazilian culture, and gaining some administrative experience. Finally, ten years after the Canela had been put on the waiting list, we arrived in their village to begin twenty-two years of linguistic research, literacy training and translation work.
On that first Canela Bible Day, in August 1990, we were so happy to have a dozen of our family or soon-to-be family there to celebrate with us. After we had distributed a Canela Bible to every believer who had proved their sincerity by memorizing hundreds of Bible verses, there was at least one Bible in every Canela home.
The Canela believers performed a celebration dance, holding their Bibles aloft and singing, “This is God’s Word. We highly respect it. We will read it. We will obey His Word.” Jo and I stood off to one side, and I said, “This feels like the greatest day of my life. I am 52 years old, but if I should drop dead right now, my life would have been well-lived.”
Sometimes people ask us, “So, how long did the Canela translation project take?” I often feel like saying, “Thirty-two years, which includes all our Bible translation-specific training.”
But that’s still not the whole truth. God was at work in Jo’s and my lives long before we met. And you may remember the story I have told of the Irishman who prayed for the Canela people for sixty years after he discovered their village way back in the 1920s when my parents were still teenagers.
And nearly two-thousand years before that, Jesus died on the cross and rose again for the Canela.
He even had the Canela people in mind back in the Garden of Eden.
Jo and I feel so blessed to have been chosen by God to finally help bring His Life-giving Word to the Canela people.
And we praise God for raising up scores of Ministry Partners who prayed and financially supported us to make it possible for us to complete this work through all those decades.