| Mark 的个人资料The Penner Place照片日志列表 |  工具  帮助 |
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2月18日 The Short Versionl $1,305/mo ($535/mo since last update) in new or increased support commitments this year. God is working—keep praying! l Japanese Sign Language Bible grant request denied-re-applying for a smaller amount. Keep praying. l Twenty people to wheelchair cleaning day, several new people came, 11 chairs cleaned and wrapped. l Pray for the Wheelchairs of Hope board meeting tomorrow. l Pray that details will come together for 12 wheelchairs to be sent to Manila next week. l Computer and software troubles are plaguing Mark. Pray for respite. Request Denied, Re-appliedThe grant request for total funding was turned down. We sent revised request for some smaller amounts, but it doesn't look promising. The application process has taken large chunks of time, always at a premium, it seems, and urgent unfinished tasks harass me daily. Pray for renewed courage to wrap my arms around the problem and attack it. Praise and Prayer requestsNational holidays allow extra people to attend wheelchair-cleaning days. On February 11th, several newcomers along with 7 people from Deaf church (a total of 20) came to repair and scrub wheelchairs. Please pray with us for final approval from an airline to send 12 wheelchairs as gratis excess baggage to Manila next week when fellow-missionaries Ken and Bola travel there. Please pray for all the sticky details to be worked out. Tomorrow is a Wheelchairs of Hope board meeting. Pray for wisdom in the deliberations. Life in JapanYesterday on the way into Tokyo I hit a dog. One of those tiny handheld cute ones doted on with red ribbons by the ears. The grandma was beside herself, the grandpa kept reassuring me that everything was fine, and me, I kept bowing low, really low, over and over and over. That evening on the way home I went back to check on grandma and grandpa and the dog. I took Mark along for moral support, and of course a box of properly gift wrapped rice-crackers. All day I had been wondering about the three. Well, Grandpa was sitting drinking his sake and the grandma had her apron on cooking supper. I saw a cat, but no sign of the dog. My heart sank. But they smiled and told me the dog was completely fine and not to worry and they'd even taken the dog on a walk and there was no problem at all and they were sorry for causing us so much worry. Leaving the door open like that—how careless! They bowed and bowed and refused to take the rice-cracker gift. I bowed and bowed and apologized and placed the gift box on the counter so they didn't have to officially receive it but I had duly given it. They bowed and said no, it had been their fault in not watching the door more closely and preventing the dog from running out into the street. A few more bows, walking backwards out the door, closing it behind us, bowing at the closed door just for good measure, and we were done. Mark said the dog was probably fine. Or dead. The people didn't yell at us, they were very kind. They didn't look like they'd spent the day crying. So maybe the dog was okay after all! Then again, it would have been nice if they’d brought poochie out to show us as proof, but they didn't. So maybe it really was dead. I guess we’ll never ever know. Unless next time I drive down that narrow street with the houses not even three feet from the road, that white dog dashes out in front of my car again. 2月6日 Summary
Everything I really needed to know I learned in . . .Monday, Mary Esther was secretly dreading an opportunity to talk to a group of 300 squirming, inattentive kindergartners about wheelchairs. When she got there, they walked quietly, single file, into the hall, sat down and folded their hands in their laps! They sat very attentively as she talked, they were with her all the way. God gave her just the right words at the right time. She was especially moved when, after asking “so with all these people needing wheelchairs, what should we do?`, a four year old boy jumped up. “I have an idea,” he said, and it was clearly a brand new one. “We could send them our wheelchairs!” The look on his face in that inspired moment was priceless. PossibilitiesWe are thrilled to have the opportunity to apply to a foundation that supports Bible translation. We’re sending the forms in today. Funding on this level would have phenomenal impact. Please pray now that they will look with favor on the proposal and perhaps even put us on track to finish translating the whole Bible by 2021.
A bit more if you have the time:
After spending days on the grunt work of filling out forms and budget sheets for the grant application, we had three big encouragements yesterday. 1) A good review of the grant application by my mentor, along with a stunningly positive letter of recommendation to add to it. 2) Getting to work with the translation team on an amazing comprehension check—judging from our past work, I thought we might get one chapter checked, but this time, with a clean new draft of well-signed work, we finished three chapters. 3) This one is going to take some explaining. Our comprehension checker (someone brought in from the community who does not know the passage tells us what they see our translation saying so we learn what is and isn’t understood rightly) has a High School education in Deaf school. When she got to 44:32, she said “You need to lose the causal conjunction there. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no causal connection between 31 and 32. If you have to say anything, maybe ‘in addition’ or something”. Well, all the Japanese translations had a causal, and most of the English had “for . . .”, which sure seemed causal to me, and of course, it translates the standard Hebrew causal connector, so I tried to explain to her how it might be causal, and kept coming up empty. Finally I looked in Translator’s Handbook and found this: “’For’, which translates the Hebrew ‘ki’, serves here to introduce still another feature of Judah’s argument. We may say, for example, ‘in addition,’ ‘that is not all, or ‘what is more’(TEV)”. When I told her she trumped all the scholars that worked on the various translations I was looking at, she said “I was just looking at the signing, and that one word was out of place, that’s all.” What this means to me is that Minamida’s signing flows naturally enough that when one little connector is out of place, it stands out. That is something to rejoice about! |
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