Two days of travel over rough roads brought Pete and Charity Rogers and their family to a bush area for a mutually encouraging Christmas visit. 

They were journeying to visit Anthony and Jennie Chee, who are ministering to the Yao people group.  The Rogers family reports that the transition from their customary city location to the quiet countryside was a welcome change.  So were the cooler temperatures. 

The children of both families delighted in their own brand of fellowship and fun.  Additionally, the fellowship shared by the two families enabled new levels of insight and new understanding in praying for each other. 

But the greatest joy for Pete and Charity was to see this work, up-close and personal, for the first time, a work that their own ministry as support missionaries makes possible.  They share their impressions that reaching the Yao people, who belong to a religious group that is hostile to Christianity, will be a challenging ministry.  

Please pray for Anthony and Jennie Chee and their family as they immerse themselves in the Yao culture and continue to learn the language.  The preparation season requires tremendous wisdom and will be acutely important in establishing readiness to begin to share the Gospel. 

Please pray for God’s grace to actively prepare the hearts of the Yao people to hear the joyful truth and  to embrace the Savior they need so much.

The Mwinika believers are searching for people to tell about Jesus.

The stage was set 25 years ago. In the late 1980s a conflict arose and encompassed most of the countries in the southern Africa. Many Mwinikas fled the fighting and settled in one area. A dispute broke out among the leaders of their predominant religion. Many leaders met together to discuss the issue. Their conclusion: “The problem with our religion is that we don’t understand God’s word. We need it in our own language.” The leaders prayed and asked God for His Word in their language.

The meeting was very high profile at the time, but as time passed, most forgot the conflict and the resulting prayer. But God does not forget.

When one of the believers mentioned that long-ago meeting, everyone there immediately responded that they remembered that time too and they realized that God had answered the prayer. The believers decided that this would be a great time to appeal to their fellow Mwinikas to come and listen to the teaching.

“For me,” wrote missionary Phil Henderson, “it was encouraging to know that God has been at work in this people group for a long time, preparing the soil for the sowing of the seed – this meeting took place about the time I was finishing elementary school.

“Please pray for the Mwinika people and for these believers who are seeking openings to share their faith with others. Pray that the Lord would use a reminder of this long-forgotten meeting to encourage many people’s interest in studying God’s word.”

You can help translate God’s Word into the Mwinika language.

Phil Henderson remembers thinking that Bible translation would be relatively straightforward and simple.

“That was before I actually did it,” he wrote recently.

Even something that seems as simple as “white” can be problematic, Phil discovered as he and his Mwinika co-workers took a stab at Exodus 4:6:

Furthermore the LORD said to him, “Now put your hand in your bosom.” And he put his hand in his bosom, and when he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous, like snow.

“We tried to come up with a way to illustrate whiteness in a culture that is not familiar with snow,” Phil wrote. He suggested “clouds.”

That didn’t seem right to the Mwinikas.

Cotton? That didn’t work either.

Really clean salt? “The translation helpers didn’t bite,” Phil wrote. Then it was their turn.

“Their suggestion was ‘it was really white, like pus is white,’” Phil wrote. “Hmmm. Somehow ‘pus’ didn’t fit with my idea of what the figure of speech needed to convey.

“Then I realized I had to explain to my helpers that this figure needed to do more than just communicate whiteness. It would be used again in the future in different contexts and had to cover a wide range of meaning. It couldn’t just convey color, it had to also convey cleanness and purity.

“This is because another important instance of the use of this figure of speech is in Isaiah 1:18,” which reads, “Come now, and let us reason together,” says the Lord, “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

“Somehow I didn’t think we could translate this ‘Your sins will be washed as white as pus’ and communicate what God was trying to say in that passage. In the end we landed (tentatively) on a type of really white clay or chalk that they occasionally use to whitewash the walls of their houses.”

Pray that Phil and his Mwinika co-workers are able to craft a translation that is clear and accurate. Find out how you can help fund the Mwinika translation.

When Emily Richardson looked out the car window at the nation’s capitol, her first thought was that the city looked like the one she was most familiar with in Mozambique.

Emily went to Mozambique with her parents Michael and Jessica when she was 3 years old. Now at 7 the USA seems a foreign place to her.

Michael and Jessica and their three children have returned to the USA for home assignment and they are experiencing culture shock in reverse.

The family made a trip to Washington, D.C., to see the wonders of the capitol.

“I think the thing that stood out most to the kids though was the water fountains,” Jessica wrote. “They couldn’t get over the fact that you can drink water from the tap and you just push the button and water squirts up your nose and if you’re lucky a little will make it into your mouth. I think we literally stopped at every water fountain in the Air and Space Museum, Natural History Museum and all along the Mall.”

A visit to a church made a sharp contrast to worship services in Mozambique.

“During worship time there were the words to the songs and videos playing on the six different huge flat screen TVs in the front of the church and artificial fog rolled in as the band started playing,” wrote Jessica. “What a difference from last week when we were sitting on a plain wooden bench in a church in Mozambique surrounded by at least three different languages, all worshipping God without any instruments except their voices.”

While the Richardson family is delighted to be back in the USA, they need prayer for their adjustment to their home culture. Pray also that God will give them wisdom about sharing with others what God has been doing in and through them in Mozambique.