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Missions

God's Patchwork Quilt

Isn't it amazing the way God sews each of our assorted experiences, interests, skills and gifts into an attractive, unique pattern? For two years, I worked in the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, immersed in indexing and digitalizing historical periodicals. I took special interest in the missionary letters. Printed in full, these turn-of-the-century papers are vivid pictures of what life was like for missionaries and their work to further God's Kingdom. Many never knew the outcome of their ministry.

I have had similar experiences. As members of Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT) and the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), from 1985 to 2000, my husband Roman and I translated the New Testament and taught Imboungu people in Papua New Guinea to read and write. During our experiences in the South Pacific, God encouraged us to persevere as an act of trusting and obeying Jesus, even though we weren't sure what the results would be. In 1998, a grassroots revival sprang up among the Imboungu people and we left many believers growing strong and true through reading the New Testament in their own language.

When we moved to Missouri from New Guinea, new pieces were added to my life. While my husband attended the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary, I indexed those century-old accounts of pioneer missionaries. I ached with their struggles and yearned to reach out in cross-cultural witness again. I was particularly fascinated to read of painstaking work of missionary families and single women in Asia.

After Roman completed his seminary study program, we were eager to return to the South Pacific to use our skills as translation consultants to help other Bible translators. But what would it be like to go to new countries to advise and train translators of many nationalities? How would we function working in places we had never been? I was eager but unsure of myself in the variety of patchwork pieces my life was becoming. Then, before we left the United States, we received our first invitation to work in an Asian country. The pattern was emerging.

One day, I was reading a paper about the people group I'm preparing to help next. Banong*, a well-trained Asian, is translating the New Testament for his own people and my work is to check his translation of the Gospel of Mark, verse by verse. I will test it with a native speaker to see if it is accurate, clear and natural. Something in the paper sounded familiar. I searched the Heritage Center's Web site and found several articles I'd indexed about people in that region and missionaries who'd worked with them. That moment gave me a glimpse of the beautiful patchwork quilt God is making of my life. However, most amazing is how the Lord is arranging us with so many of His other children to shape His Kingdom.

*Not his real name. Many of the national translators we work with are in sensitive countries.

JANICE STEFANIW