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)