Every year on November 11 we pause our busy schedules for the Wycliffe World Day of Prayer. It's a day to gather together with other believers and focus our prayers on the work of Bible translation all over the world. This year Jeannette and I organized the event for the office here in Musoma.
We gathered with about 50 people including Tanzanian staff and missionaries from England, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, and the U.S.
We prayed for specific needs in each of the departments in our office: Translation, Linguistics, Literacy, Scripture Use, Operations, Partnership, and Lake Victoria Learning Center.
Then we prayed for the work of Bible translation all around the world.
- We prayed for the translation work on a tiny island in the South Pacific called Niuafo'ou. The Niuafo'ou people are becoming excited about their language and they are preparing to print the Gospel of Luke.
- We prayed for Deaf people who use over 400 sign languages in the world. We prayed that God would make a way for Deaf people to have the Bible in their own language.
- We prayed for Bible translation projects in Muslim countries. In one country in central Asia, a young Christian woman named Hanna was being persecuted by her Muslim in-laws. They rejected her faith and called her "unclean" and cast her out of the family. Eventually her husband divorced her. After this persecution, Hanna came in contact with a translation team translating the Bible into her language. They asked her to read a draft of the book of Job and check it for naturalness. Hanna was deeply impacted by the Word of God. She felt like she could identify with Job in his sufferings and this gave her great comfort and hope. She is now waiting for the rest of the Bible to be translated into her language.
I shared an encouragement from the Word (in Swahili!!) to focus our prayer time. We looked at the story of King Jehoshaphat from 2 Chronicles 20. God's people were threatened with invasion and destruction by three foreign armies. The Bible says King Jehoshaphat "turned his face to seek the LORD" (20:3). In Jehoshaphat's prayer he said, "We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you" (20:12). Such a good reminder in times of fear and uncertainty and threats and trials. Our God is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-wise and always good and always with us. We can turn to him and trust him.
Our kids really enjoyed the prayer time as well. They said, "It was so good to pray with other people outside of our family," and "I liked reading Scriptures about God and then praising him for those things."
