One of the benefits of my Bible study class is that I get more insight into the ladies’ lives. They are generally more guarded than I am, but when I ask what they would like me to pray for, they sometimes share their problems or concerns with me. One of the ladies (we will call her Sonny), was pregnant when my class began and shared that “she is having a problem and is afraid that she will die during labor." Her pregnancy was due to an adulterous relationship (which was public knowledge). This was a great opportunity for me to pray for her. I prayed that she would trust in Jesus for salvation, that she would deliver the baby without issue, and that we would all recognize that every baby is a gift, though the circumstances of her conception were wrong. Sonny did deliver and came to no harm. We thanked God for that! A week or so later, another lady from the class said that she is worried about ladies who are currently pregnant because two different young mothers recently died in childbirth in some nearby villages. “But you prayed for Sonny and she is fine.” Then last week, Manu came to see us. Manu is not a close friend or an enemy. He doesn’t attend Zach’s Bible study, but (as far as we know) hasn’t spoken against us either. His new wife was in the last stages of pregnancy and this baby wasn’t coming. Though this baby was Manu’s first child, his wife is a widow and has 6 children from her previous marriage. Over the last few weeks as I have seen Manu, I have asked about his wife and if she had the baby yet; He was excited that she was starting to have pains so it would be soon. But after a couple weeks of the same, he came to ask for prayer. Actually, he came to ask us for an egg. There is an ancestral practice here of praying over an egg and having the sick person eat it. We told him that the Bible doesn’t tell us to do that, but we would come to his house to pray for her. He eagerly accepted. I don’t doubt that there is word around town that my prayers have helped other pregnant women! So here we are, in Manu’s hut with his new wife who we don’t know well. There is so little physically I can do to help her. There is little temporal hope I can offer. Did she just count the weeks wrong? Is the baby actually facing the wrong way? Is there some serious problem? We prayed for them and shared the gospel with them and she was thankful but clearly not at ease about the whole situation. We were so thankful to hear that she gave birth to a healthy boy soon after. So, I suppose my reputation will stand as the patron saint of pregnant ladies. Just kidding :) I just wanted to share this anecdote because these situations are so typical here - the interactions, the needs, the misunderstandings, the cultural differences. Just another little taste of life as a missionary in remote PNG.

Our littlest one turned three on Monday! She is a petite, cute, funny little sister and we celebrated her with tacos, cake, and presents.

We made these five short videos for our church's VBS. I wanted to put them here on the blog for anyone who might want to watch, too. Are kids helped make them and they give a quick overview of life and ministry here! Video One: Why Did We Come to PNG?:

We recently enjoyed time with Benaiah and Tom who were here to visit us for 10 days. Tom is a seminary student who got connected with us and is interested in the work we do here. He loves the Biblical languages and is interested in maybe using his knowledge of them to translate the Bible.

Our boys finished school on April 27, and then we took a break out of the village! It was a good chance for a rest and we had paperwork to attend to, so we ended up in 3 different places in 2 weeks. Finished with 6th:

As I wrote in the post "A Busy March," we have been working toward establishing literacy in a village a couple mountains away - Kongo. Kongo is still among the same language group and they heard that we had a class available to learn to read and write in their heart language, Do (pronounced Doe). And so they sent six men to come and take part in our literacy class last year. For the sake of this post, let me introduce them here: Dewiwi (the leader among them), Iramo, Simit, Dawa, Parati, and Idige. After they graduated, we started making plans for them to teach others in their own village. The deal is: they must to have enough people finish literacy that they can appoint 3-4 as teachers, they need to build a classroom, and they need to have community support (ie: not just one family who wants to start literacy somewhere). If a village can do all this then we will pay for and print all the materials. In March, these six Kongo graduates hiked back over to us and set up a meeting to tell us that all was ready! Do we have materials for them? Would I be willing to come next month to an opening of the Do literacy class in Kongo Village? Yes and yes. They hiked all the books, a big wooden box (to hold them), two chalkboards (!), and a bunch of smaller miscellaneous supplies to Kongo and then Monday we set out to visit them.

Last week we celebrated Jude's birthday! We had a special lunch, cake, presents, and games. Birthdays here are twice as fun with teammates!

I was reading a biography recently. It was a relatively short biography of John MacDonald, which takes up a single chapter in Iain Murray's book A Scottish Christian Heritage . And in that chapter there is an introductory paragraph about a man who was a missionary pioneer in northern Highlands of Scotland. His name was Eneas Sage, and his whole life fit quite neatly on the first half of page 130. Evidently, Sage moved into the town of Lochcarron in 1726 and ministered there till he died in 1774. Murray provides Sage's own testimony that he went to this dark and cold place "merely to pave the way, if it were practicable, for settling the bounds with a gospel ministry, though it should be at the peril of my life." And peril he faced. His house was burned down and at least three attempts were made on his life. After six years of work, there was one family coming to hear him preach in a tiny thatched church. After 20 years of laboring, he was still treated as an outsider and had to evade yet another assassination attempt. But at the end of nearly 50 years of toil, there were some who "were themselves the primitive fathers of the spiritual generations that followed them." And with that line, the story of Eneas Sage came to an end, and the story moved on to recount the accomplishments of others. A whole ministry boiled down into a paragraph. 50 hard and lonely years, summarized in just a few sentences. A whole life that serves as an introduction to the next. Yet I cannot help but admire how the Lord Jesus used Eneas Sage. Someone had to go and start tilling that soil. And that is exactly what Sage did. He paved the way—just like he intended to do. And while he is literally what we might call a footnote on the pages of history, his toil mattered to his Master. And who cares what history records, so long as at the end of our labors we get to hear the words, "Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your Master" (Matthew 25:23).

Zach recently recorded a Sunday school hour for our local church. The first ten minutes are few videos with the kids of some new things on our ridge. The rest of the video is about the challenge of determining story breaks in Mark. Specifically, he discussed Mark 6 and the connection between the sending out of the disciples and Herod's beheading of John. See below if you are interested!