During November we’re focusing on finding our strength in God. Please see the Prayer page to read our strategic prayer request for this month and pray with us.

By Lori Witham

Very often missionaries working overseas face daunting responsibilities, tremendous challenges, overwhelming workloads, and deep spiritual opposition. As Christians, the only way for us to face these difficulties is through the power and strength of God.

A part of the literacy material used by PBT in the early school grades’ curricula are storybooks called “shell books,” which are set up in the computer ready to print, except that the text frames are empty. When each story is translated into a vernacular language, the text is pasted into those frames. The PBT team putting together the curricula for the vernacular schools we work with have selected appropriate stories for each grade’s classes, and they need to make sure the shell books are ready when the stories are translated.

A few weeks ago, Diane Miller was very busy working on the E1 curriculum that will be available to translate into any language. Martha Wade was also busy preparing the E1 curriculum stories for the Apal language. I am guessing that they both felt the work ahead was overwhelming. Possibly Satan whispered that this was too much for them.

As this was going on, I was busy producing Mborena Kam New Testament books to be printed out by the Mbore team who were busy proofreading their entire New Testament before the final typesetting work is done.

So I also felt I was given a daunting request when Diane emailed me and asked me to assist her and Martha with a need they had. We have many shell books available, but the curricula material uses diglot (two languages) shell books that have the stories in both English and the vernacular. The diglot shell books are not completed in the collection. Would I finish cleaning up a group of diglot shell books to help Diane and Martha prepare the E1 Curriculum material? Satan whispered to me that I was already extremely busy with the Mborena Kam work. I didn’t have the strength to do both.

But after talking with God about this challenge, He reminded me that by His strength alone we are able to do what we would never think possible. I agreed to do it, and I found in the next few weeks that whenever I was waiting for the Mbore men, I could work on the shell books. I worked back and forth, and got a lot of work completed on both projects. I relied on God’s strength and enabling, and as always, He came through. There’s much more work to do on both projects, but I have confidence in my God that He will enable it all to be completed in His own way.

Lori serves as PBT-PNG’s desktop publishing specialist, preparing translated Scripture text to send to the printer for publication.