It’s a New Day Dawning

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It’s a New Day Dawning

My last InSights and OutBursts blog post was over a month ago. I compared the thousands of snowflakes piling up on our mountain ash berries to the many tiny improvements in Jo’s recovery from her lumbar laminectomy. We give thanks for this continuing recovery process. Many of you readers wrote to tell me this concept of giving God thanks for even tiny improvements was an encouragement to them.

Here are some major changes Jo is experiencing: first, the constant terrible pains going down Jo’s hips and legs have totally stopped. Hallelujah! Jo reduced her painkiller use drastically.
Her legs, however, are still numb from the knees down, probably the neuropathic side effect of her cancer chemotherapy. When Jo walks, holding onto her walker, she constantly looks down to see where her feet are. She has one “dropped foot” so she can’t feel if one foot is standing on the floor or on top of the other. A major tripping hazard! She has two appointments in the next few weeks: with her neurologist and her surgeon. They may prescribe an AFO, ankle-foot-orthosis.

The other problem is that in the middle of the night, she wakes up with pain as if a needle is jabbing into the heel of her dropped foot. It doesn’t let up unless she walks about, so she is losing sleep. We are now trying a new special Capsaicin pepper pain-management ointment that I massage into her heel before her noon nap, her bedtime, and whenever she wakes me up during the night. It seems to be working, and we are learning to look “on the bright side” which is also a Biblical command.

“He gives His beloved sleep” Ps. 127:2, is a promise we claim every night. We also take a lot of courage from John K. Paine’s hymn, based on Psalm 103, which we sing frequently, the chorus of which goes:
Bless the Lord, oh my soul,
Oh my soul, worship His Holy name
Sing like never before,
Oh my soul, I’ll worship Your Holy name

The three verses also inspire us enormously!

The sun comes up, it’s a new day dawning
It’s time to sing Your song again
Whatever may pass, and whatever lies before me
Let me be singing when the evening comes

You’re rich in love, and You’re slow to anger
Your name is great, and Your heart is kind
For all Your goodness, I will keep on singing
Ten thousand reasons for my heart to find

And on that day, when my strength is failing
The end draws near, and my time has come
Still, my soul will sing Your praise unending
Ten thousand years, and then forevermore!

May God inspire and encourage each of you as you face your own “pains in the night” while waiting for the new day to dawn.
Blessings, Jack

 

 

 

 

Giving Thanks to God for Small Blessings

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The Emergency
Jo’s doctor called her on October 31, it was not a ‘Trick or Treat’ call. “I read your reports, you need to go to Emergency right now for an immediate MRI of your lower back and hips.” Jo had been on the waiting list for that test as well as a neurologist appointment for well over six months.

I took her to ER immediately. She was checked and admitted to the hospital and eventually had the test. After a week, she was released, taking narcotics for the pain and crippling, along with a walker while waiting for a date for another type of test and a neurology appointment. Two weeks later, she suddenly had such severe pain that we called 911. She ended up in the largest hospital in the city with neurosurgeons on staff. After more tests, she underwent a lumbar laminectomy surgery. The bone caps on four of her lower vertebrae were removed to allow the spinal cord to expand and operate normally.

The Lesson
That stopped the hip pains and back pains, but since she is 85 years old, she is taking a long time to recover. And that’s when we began to learn to thank God for small, even tiny, improvements: the subject of this blog post and of the photo of the mountain-ash tree loaded with red berries. Each of those berries caught one snowflake, and then another, and another. Multi-millions of tiny snowflakes later, this was the startling result!

Jo needed constant attention and regular medications. I kept track on daily computer charts for when to give her six different types of medicines, as well as food,  bathroom, temperature, emotions, sleep, and changes of position like sitting up, lying on a couch, and, of course, changing the bandage on the six-inch-long, 18-staples incision.

We read some Scriptures about having the right attitude, giving thanks even for the small things:
In everything, give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. (1 Thes. 5:18.) It was a good thing I like keeping charts because the tiny day-by-day improvements might have been overlooked.

The Examples
Sometimes, what made us give thanks to God was just one less Oxycodone tablet than the day before. Or a tiny improvement in digestion. Or a bit less redness in the incision after the staples were removed, an hour more sleep at night, or getting out of bed by herself for the first time, or a day without Tylenol.
We encouraged ourselves with Scriptures like Job 8:7, “Though your beginnings will seem humble, your future will be prosperous.”
And Isaiah 28:10, Speaking about bringing rest and refreshing, he wrote, “Do this, do that, here a little, there a little.”
And Zech. 4:6, 10 “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord Almighty. “Who dares despise the day of small things? They shall rejoice.”

God was guiding us with His “still small voice” as He did when he spoke to Elijah, (1 Kings 19:11). And that is okay for Jo and me. We don’t need a whirlwind or an earthquake type of miracle. We will just keep on noting each tiny improvement on the chart and thank Him for that.
God can even make tiny things like a mustard seed grow into a great tree; a comparison Jesus used to illustrate the Kingdom of God. (Luke 13:18-20) It’s a good application to be thankful for Jo’s small improvements in health and strength.

Pray that we will hang in there for the long haul, in the manner of Galatians 6:9, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”
And those of you who are in different situations, practice giving thanks for even small improvements and praising God as he works, bit by bit, towards a positive solution for you.

May God grant you all a blessed Christmas and New Year’s celebration. My next blog post will be in mid-January, as God wills.

Blessings,
Jack

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

God Loves to be Asked.

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God Loves to be Asked.

Each time my wife and I returned to the Wycliffe Centre in Belem after five or six months in the Canela village, we brought an enthusiastic report. The Canela people had adopted us into their kinship system and gave us all Canela names. They willingly built a mud and palm thatch house for us and cut the bush to make an airstrip. They eagerly helped us learn to speak their language. They gladly accepted the modern medicine we brought. They earnestly urged us to develop and learn to read booklets so they could learn to read their language. Others were eager to help us translate the Bible.

We thought this was normal until we heard reports from our colleagues working with groups speaking different languages. They spoke of people without any desire to learn to read; some rejected the offered medicines and disliked helping our fellow workers learn their languages. Others found no one to help them translate the Bible. We wondered why we were so blessed.

Then, one day, we got a letter from a man in Ireland named Joe. This is what he wrote:
“Dear Brother Jack and Sister Jo,
I just heard that you have been assigned to translate God’s Word for the Canela people of Brazil, and I am delighted. When I was a young man, I was a missionary in Brazil, and one day, my companions and I stumbled upon a village we had not known existed. The people could not understand any of the languages we spoke, and we certainly couldn’t understand them. Since they were a fierce-looking group, we decided to travel on and sleep in the jungle instead of in that village.”

He told us that he learned later that this people group was called the Canela, and how God moved him to pray daily for them. He started to pray for the Canela people ten years before Jo and I were even born!
And he continued to pray for them for forty years until we arrived as thirty-year-olds.
He then prayed faithfully for another twenty-two years until the partial Bible was translated into Canela, and a church was planted.
Then, after sixty-two years of praying, the Lord took him Home, no doubt, to his exceeding great reward.

Several years after we had completed the translation work, we visited the Canela village. Many of the residents were away working in their field gardens, but we did manage to take family photos of about four hundred Canela people and recorded their names and their relationships.

I frequently told this Irishman’s story when asked to speak in churches and Wycliffe fund-raising banquets. I always ended with this offer,
“If any of you come to me at the end of the service and say, ‘Please give me a picture and the name of a Canela man, woman or child, and I will regularly pray for that person for the rest of my life,’ I will give you a name and a picture of someone for whom no one else has yet committed to pray.”
Within a few months, four hundred prayer warriors pledged to pray for an individual Canela person. Even now, decades later, I still get emails from many people saying things like this, “I’m still praying daily for the little girl in the photo. By now, she is twenty years older and very likely married with a family, so I pray for them all.”

It has been thirty-four years since Jesus fulfilled His promise, “I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” There are far more Canela believers now than when we left. A missionary from Germany has worked as a Bible teacher and has baptized scores of Canela young people over the past few decades.

God loves to hear us pray and ask Him to act, and He wants to hear us pray continually. 1 Thess. 5:17 (NIV)

We Remember Them

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We Remember Them

I was about five years old when my parents told me what had happened to our country, the Netherlands, when I was a baby.

“Bad soldiers came from another country.” they said, “They came breaking God’s rules. They lied to us, and they stole things, they hurt people. There were so many of them, all with big guns, that they chased away all our good soldiers and our good policemen.”

I nodded. I had already seen lots of those enemy soldiers with their guns on the streets and had heard about them stealing bicycles and radios from people’s houses.

“But now they are also starting to steal men—daddies, uncles, big brothers, even young grandpas,” my mom said. “They are locking them into train boxcars and taking them to their own country to work like slaves on farms, and in mines and in factories.”

“If you see an army truck on our street, with soldiers going into houses, you come right home. Don’t shout, just come home and once you are inside, tell us about it. Then daddy can hide.”

I remember times my dad crawled into a space below the floor in a back room, and my mom closed the trap door. Then we rolled the carpet back over it and with both of us pushing, moved the heavy sideboard back into place. I brushed out the tracks on the carpet, so it looked as if nothing had been moved.

Pinning on a poppy in preparation for Remembrance Day, I remember the day Canadian soldiers freed my city. I wrote the memory years ago and read it during a talk at a Remembrance Chapel at the local Christian School. I repeat it here in honour of those who gave their lives in war so that my countrymen and I might live in peace.

I squirmed and squeezed my thin seven-year-old body through the jostling crowd until I conquered a spot on the curb. The bright sunshine warmed my face, arms and bare knees as I squinted into the light. I clutched my little paper flag, the Dutch red, white and blue, ready to wave, ready to shout and ready to sing a welcome to our rescuers. It was Tuesday, May 8, 1945.

The approaching rumble of a column of Canadian army trucks started the crowd up the road cheering and singing. The noise grew louder as huge, dull green trucks blocked out the sun. Shouting, laughing soldiers waved their machine guns from the backs of the trucks. The applause and cheers of the delirious crowd lining the street nearly drowned out the singing of Wilhelmus, the Dutch national anthem.

Young soldiers whistled at the tall blonde girl jumping up and down behind me. Her homemade rose petal perfume fought the stink of the diesel exhaust fumes and the stench of close-pressed sweating bodies—bodies and clothing that had not been touched by soap for years. Camouflaged tanks grumbled past, pulling long-snouted artillery. Their thunderous booming had kept me awake for several nights. Now the cannons were sniffing the air, eager to rout the enemy from the next city.

The cheers died down suddenly as a column of prisoners of war in grey-green uniforms shuffled past. The Luger pistol holsters flapped empty on their brown leather belts. They walked with their fingers laced on top of their heads. Armed Canadian soldiers walked alongside them.

The crowd silently watched the infantry prisoners go by, but then began to boo and hiss as a small column of Gestapo officers came into view. Finally! No more strutting. No more haughty looks. No more death-dealing commands. Their once-feared black uniforms glistened with the slime of saliva as people rushed from the curb to spit on them.

The last trucks in the parade rolled past. I cheered myself hoarse and waved my little flag until a soldier snatched it out of my hand and waved it high as his truck rumbled on down the road. I tasted the salt of tears, not for the loss of the flag, but for the joy of knowing the Peace Bringers had arrived and the enemy would never make me afraid again.

Today, again, I Remember Them.

Believers: How to Live as God’s Ambassadors in Canadian Society.

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An ambassador represents his home country in a foreign land. One of their duties is to safeguard the interests of citizens from their home country visiting or living in the host country.

Christians are ambassadors who represent God, the King of our heavenly home country. We seek to safeguard the God-given rights of His people who live with us on earth. (2 Cor. 5:10).

As God’s ambassadors in Canada, we have been given rights and responsibilities for how God’s people are governed.

We are also called to be salt and light in this world. (Mat. 5:13-16) As salt, we preserve the good, and as light, we show the difference between evil and good.

God deposes kings and raises up others. (Dan. 2:21).

The ambassador analogy breaks down in the areas of voting or becoming part of the government. Ambassadors can vote or become part of the government in their home nation but never in the host nation.

As God’s ambassadors, however, we are citizens of heaven, as well as citizens of Canada. God even calls some Christians to be personally involved in government.

This leads us to three main points all believers need to understand.

  1. Voting is not just a Canadian Right; it is every Christian’s Duty as a representative of God and His Kingdom.
    He wants all Christians to vote in choosing government leaders. But what if we consider two opposing leaders and find something wrong with both of them? To decide, “I can’t vote for either of them,” is not a godly option.

 2. We need to vote for the better choice, not the perfect choice. God, too, used flawed, imperfect people. Every election is about choosing the least evil.
God made Samson physically strong, but he was imperfect. He visited prostitutes and married a non-Israelite woman, disobeying God’s specific commands. God, however, still used him to lead Israel for 20 years, and he is listed on the Honour Roll of Heroes-of-Faith in Hebrews 11.

  1. We need to choose the leader based on their better policies, not on their pleasing personality.
                   Thou shalt have no other gods before me
  1. The first of the Ten Commandments demands that we put God first place in people’s lives. What are the leaders’ policies towards the Christian faith?
  2. God established the family unit. What are their policies towards parental rights?
  3. God created humans, male and female. What are their policies about biological sex?
  4. God is the Life-giver. What are their policies towards abortion?

As God’s Ambassadors we must focus not on party politics, but on leaders’ policies.

Based on notes taken from an election sermon video by Pastor Gary Hamrick of Virginia, USA.

God’s Word in Every Language on Earth—Doing it His Way

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God’s Word in Every Language on Earth—Doing it His Way
When my wife, Jo, and I joined Wycliffe Bible Translators in 1965, we were influenced by a book that was published six years earlier. Two Thousand Tongues to Go which was the story of the beginning of Wycliffe Bible Translators.
At that time, the Bible had already been translated into most European languages and the major languages of Asia and Africa. This book, however, focused on the need for translation into the possibly two thousand languages spoken by indigenous people groups that were not fluent in the national language of the countries in which they lived.

What nobody knew back in the mid-1960s was that there were about 7,400 languages spoken in the world, of which only a few hundred were national languages. During the next thirty-five years, Wycliffe trained linguists, discovered and researched thousands of Indigenous languages, and began working in many hundreds of them as Bible translators.

VISION 2025
In 1999, Wycliffe and SIL International set a challenging goal for the worldwide Church and for themselves; VISION 2025, a twenty-five-year sprint to start a Bible translation program in every language that needs one by the year 2025.
Those of us Wycliffe translators who, during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, had worked for decades to complete a translation considered this over-the-top goal a fantasy that could not possibly be reached.
After all, just as all Bible translators before us, we worked with pencils and slips of paper to make our dictionaries. Every word of every first draft was written out by pen and ink, and after 1950, switched to more efficient ballpoint pens. Later drafts were pecked out on manual typewriters.

God’s Plan: From Ballpoints to Computers.
It was only in the 1980s that we started using a few computers. They were slow, primitive, clunky, and, although expensive, prone to frequent breakdowns. Even so, they were faster than whacking away on a typewriter and eventually became more useful.
But God was at work improving the electronic equipment industry. God also led highly trained and strongly motivated programmers to progress in their abilities to speed up and improve the work of translation of His Word.

God at Work
During the past few decades, Wycliffe Canada programmers working with partners in Wycliffe USA developed what is now known as The Bible Translator’s Assistant (TBTA). This software analyses a target language and produces a first draft template of translation. TBTA is constantly improving in accuracy and ease of use. The result is a vast decrease in both the time and cost of translating Scriptures.

I was in my last year as president of Wycliffe Canada in 1999 when Wycliffe and SIL International cast Vision 2025. Wycliffe Canada joined with a special recruiting program called “Race to 2025.” God not only increased the Wycliffe Canada membership, but he also grew the number of translators to work with better-educated national translators. He vastly increased the number of donors and the size of their gifts. Many more prayer warriors are involved. With the growing experience in the new way of doing translation, God is receiving much praise and thanks for what He is doing.

Evidence of God’s Blessing
In 1999 when the Sprint to 2025 vision was cast, a new language Bible translation program was started every two weeks. But then God speeded up the task.
2019-’21, a new program started every five days.
In 2021-’23, a new program started every 30 hours.
This year, 2024, a new program starts every 17 hours!
Over 4,000 languages have translation programs currently in progress.

This weekend is Canadian Thanksgiving.
How appropriate to give thanks for what God is doing in world evangelization and especially in making sure that His prophetic Word will be fulfilled:
“After this, I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.” (Rev. 7:9 NIV)