Lives are Changing

00:00
Marie
But after the parents go to their fields, the kids sneak to church on Sunday. And now some of the parents are coming to me and saying thank you, because they see that their lives are changing. So I’m seeing fruit in the lives of my kids. 

00:22
Rich Rudowske
Welcome to the essentially translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible translators. I’m Richardowski. 

00:27
Emily Wilson
And I’m Emily Wilson. And today we have a really special episode for you. Mark and Marie are our missionaries. We can’t share their location or the language communities that we’re working with, but they are incredible. If you recognize their voices, you are blessed. They are some of the most loving, mission minded people I know. But we ask in advance that you not share about their ministry publicly on your social media. You can share this post, but please do not disclose their information of name or their region. 

01:03
Rich Rudowske
And what I love about this interview was just hearing how in these areas where God is at work, where we can’t really share all the details that God is at work and lives are changing in ways that are just so inspiring. And also Mark and Marie’s long term service and how God has worked and changed their perspective through the years. 

01:24
Emily Wilson
Over 30 years. 

01:25
Rich Rudowske
Over 30 years in service. So what a great privilege to talk to Mark and Marie. We’re glad to share that with you. 

01:36
Emily Wilson
Today. We are with Mark and Marie on essentially translatable. Welcome to the podcast. 

01:43
Mark
Hey, thank you. It’s good to be with you. 

01:46
Emily Wilson
So you serve internationally in God’s mission, and you have a long and winding road story. So could you share a little bit about what inspired you to get involved in God’s mission? 

01:58
Mark
Maybe I’ll let Marie go first. She has kind of some deep roots in the field of Bible translation. 

02:04
Marie
Sure. Well, I was privileged to spend much of my childhood living overseas because my parents were involved in the Bible translation ministry with LBT, actually in West Africa. And I got to see firsthand that there are many places in the world that have much more limited opportunity to hear the good news about Jesus, because there simply isn’t scripture in a language they could understand or even an Alphabet that could be used to record their language. And I saw the excitement of the local people our family was privileged to work with when they did start getting the word in their language. And that just left a lasting impression on me. 

02:48
Marie
And as I continued into young adulthood, the knowledge, I think that there are many places in the world that lag far behind in terms of opportunity to hear the good news about Jesus just kept tugging at my heart. And during college, I was involved with intervarsity christian fellowship, and there was a strong focus on the importance of Bible study in small groups and in your personal growth as a believer. And I was able to be involved in activities with international students, learning about their cultures and worldview and exchanging ideas about belief systems. And then at just opportune time, I met a handsome man named Mark. God was working in his heart in a similar way. And as we got to know each other more, we started to pray about it and think, well, let’s begin pursuing service abroad and see where the Lord leads. 

03:44
Marie
Yeah, I’ll pass the baton to you. 

03:46
Mark
Yeah. Well, yeah. For me, it’s interesting, there were really kind of a diverse set of influences in my life kind of started. I had at least a couple of extended family members who had been involved international mission where a great uncle and my mom’s first cousin kind of served their ministries india, their whole careers, and kind of heard stories from their experiences growing up. My family went to a christian camp every summer, and there were speakers who were missionaries, current and former missionaries, who kind of gave me a growing understanding from the stories that they shared just a little bit about what cross cultural mission work was about. And it was really interesting to hear what God was doing in various parts of the world, even in situations where the conditions were difficult, with poverty, even war and political strife and such things. 

04:44
Mark
But hearing about the transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ in those places, I think, really touched me as a kid. As a teenager, actually, I had a youth group leader who encouraged a group of us to go on a summer trip. And so I guess it was after my senior year in high school, a few of us went to Nigeria on a trip. And so we worked to, I think it was about maybe a month and a half or so, we worked to build a library on a mission compound and did some VBS activities in the evenings. And it opened a window to me to see that the faith that I had was something that was shared by people on the other side of the world. 

05:28
Mark
And though it was expressed in some pretty different ways culturally and whatnot, that it was the same faith. And, yeah, that just kind of opened my eyes to things that were really a growing understanding of who, you know, beyond the bonds of my own culture. And I had a similar experience in college, went on a trip to South America. We did showings of the Jesus film in northern Argentina. And, yeah, all those experiences, I guess, really drew me to see that our God is a God that is working in the world. And there are many opportunities really to share. So, yeah, when we got to know each other in Ivy university is fairly focused on world missions. We went to mission conferences together and such things. 

06:18
Mark
And after we started dating, I think it was my end of my senior year, we started to think about what God might be calling us into. So I think it was at a great commission convocation. I don’t even know if they still have those in our LCMS church body. But we learned about an opportunity to serve in another part of the world, and that’s eventually what ended up happening, that we ended up kind of following up on this particular opportunity. 

06:48
Marie
I’ll add one note in there. We went for an interview with LCMS World Mission very shortly after were married, and they offered us a position to serve overseas. And were expecting, at that point in our life, newly married, we just wanted to do something for a short bit of know, a year or two, come back and get some schooling and then really dive into a career overseas. But when we got there, they said, well, we want you to commit to at least five years. 

07:18
Emily Wilson
Wow. 

07:18
Marie
And that was not what we expected. And were like, wow. That wasn’t in our plan. So we said, let us think about it. And went away and told our families and prayed about it. And then we talked with a seasoned missionary and we told him our dilemma, what should we do? And he looked at us and he said, mark and Marie, if you don’t go now, I don’t think you’re ever going to go. And that was just like the word of the Holy Spirit saying, okay, well, we’re just going to dive in. This wasn’t our plan, but must be the Lord. So here we go. So six months after were married, we arrived overseas and, wow, that was the fast track. Not necessarily a great idea for everyone, but that was the Lord’s plan for us. 

08:05
Emily Wilson
That is awesome. I’m just completely in awe of how your families, your experiences are just woven together and how they inspired and they prompted and they challenged you in your understanding of who God is and who he has called you to be as his people, for his people, and that power of being prompted by the holy spirit to work in his community and to share his love. That is awesome. 

08:35
Rich Rudowske
So how long have you been doing this now with that original five year commitment? 

08:40
Mark
Yeah. Well, that five year commitment basically turned into about 15 years, and that was serving under LCMS World mission. But at the end of that time, so we was focused mainly on doing urban ministry, urban evangelism in the part of the world that we’re still in actually now kind of in a big urban setting, working with a team to basically share the gospel through english language centers. And through that team, we’re part of helping plant a couple churches there. So kind of toward the end of that time, Marie’s sister and her husband were working in a nearby country, and they were actually working in the field of Bible translation. And we got an opportunity over Christmas break to go visit them and to see their work. And they were in a remote part of the country working with a minority group there. 

09:33
Mark
And, yeah, it was a new understanding for us to see kind of the special needs of minority groups in that part of the world, to understand that there are lots of issues that groups and tribal groups like that face. But one of the biggest of them, though, being not only lacking opportunities for health care and education and experiencing different forms of injustice, but basically not having the opportunity to read God’s word and understand God’s word in their own minority languages. And so God really used that to, I guess, increase our awareness about this need, the need, really to provide access to the word of God for those peoples. And those peoples tend to be the least of these and those that have been maybe bullied a lot. And so, yeah, that, I think, was the calling that we began to hear. 

10:34
Mark
So that’s a long way to say. So it was about 15 years of our first service. And then as we ended that period of time, went and got our linguistics training, and after that, been back out on the field under Luke and Bible translators now for going on 15 years as well. 

10:53
Emily Wilson
Awesome. 

10:54
Marie
If you do the math, we first went overseas in 1990. That was about 32 years ago. 

11:01
Emily Wilson
Congratulations. 

11:04
Rich Rudowske
So we want to talk a little bit about the type of work you do. You’re involved in doing scripture engagement work. So first, let’s start by talking about what is scripture engagement? 

11:14
Mark
Yeah. So we mentioned that went to school to study linguistics, but really, yeah. What drew us into work overseas and what drew us into cross cultural mission work was really in our own lives, experiencing the transformation that the word of God had for us, whether it was through being a part of a Bible study or personal devotions or hearing powerful messages from the word of God. And we knew that the word of God is really the source of life. 

11:53
Mark
And that’s something, I guess, that we realized that basically engaging with the scriptures in a broader sense means allowing the word of God or finding ways to have the word of God have the impact, the life giving impact that it’s intended to have and kind of in one sense, all of the things that we do in Bible translation is aimed at providing those opportunities for people maybe that have lacked access to the word of God in ways that they can understand clearly. So that’s kind of maybe a broader way to think about it. Maybe Marie can add to that scripture engagement. 

12:34
Marie
That term is a little difficult to define because it encompasses a broad range of activities, but maybe a definition might go something like this. Scripture engagement involves accessing, understanding, and interacting meaningfully with the life changing message of the scriptures. And people who work in scripture engagement. Their goal is to help language communities consider and plan for access to the scriptures in the language and media that serve them best. So understanding, accessing, and interacting meaningfully with the scriptures is kind of the heart of scripture engagement. There are a lot of activities that fall under that umbrella. 

13:21
Mark
So, for example, when went to study linguistics, were basically getting training that would help us specifically focus on doing literacy work. But really due to our past ministry experience and kind of a growing understanding of the needs in the field of Bible translation in our region of assignment, our work kind of broadened out from just focusing on literacy to scripture engagement in that context. I guess, really over the years, LBT and other organizations that have been engaged in Bible translation ministry have kind of recognized that giving people from minority language groups access to the scriptures, it needs to involve more than simply translating the Bible into their language, printing them for distribution, and in the process, developing a writing system and a literacy program that will allow people to be able to read the Bible for themselves. 

14:25
Mark
So the field of scripture engagement kind of grew out of a need to kind of ensure that the products of Bible translation products were actually being used in churches and homes. Unfortunately, over the course of Bible translation movements work worldwide in the last 50 to 70 years, there have been many situations where a project has been finished in the New Testament, printed, and really even celebrated. But after kind of all was said and done, sometimes few people were actually using it in practice. Sometimes there were boxes of printed New Testaments that would just remain in warehouse somewhere, or maybe never make it into the hands of the people they were intended for, or perhaps just never get used in the church service or in the devotional lives of families and individuals. 

15:22
Mark
So as follow up was done to Bible translation projects like that, and this kind of whole idea was investigated, it became apparent that there were a number of important factors that contributed to whether or not the Bible translation project products were well used. So I won’t go into a lot of detail here about that, but kind of applying these learnings form the basis of what we might call scripture engagement. Sometimes we explain it to people this way in this effort to give access to the word of God to people through Bible translation. We don’t want to see Bibles in boxes or just gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. We don’t want to see people’s lives that are unchanged. 

16:12
Mark
Instead, we want to see the scriptures used and understood and people’s hearts filled with faith and their lives transformed, producing good know that comes through the Holy Spirit, working through God’s powerful guess I’m not sure if that’s clear or not, but that’s kind of where the field or kind of our area of work is. Helping see to it that the word of God as it’s translated has the intended impact that it can as people really engage with God’s word and God’s word engages with their hearts, right? 

16:51
Emily Wilson
Sometimes, as I’ve heard people asking, what is scripture engagement? What does that even look like? Sometimes I feel like it’s almost that we’re so immersed in it already, thinking about what we have grown up with, if we’re lifelong christians and what has just been made available to us, all of the resources, that we don’t necessarily even stop to think about it as a scripture engagement tool. For example, just Sunday school material that I grew up with from the get go that was breaking down the stories of scripture to encourage me to go and to read my bible. So what does that look like on the ground for you guys as you’re working in scripture engagement? What does that typically look like as you’re engaging with your community? 

17:39
Marie
Yeah, those are good questions. And as you said, emily, we don’t always realize that the products and methods we use in our daily lives or grown up with really come under the umbrella of scripture engagement. But in our setting, some of the activities that we work on with our team to help people really interact with the word in a way that has the fewest barriers for them, would include developing audio scripture resources. Our team, we have a small recording studio, and we record scripture portions and a lot of christian songs. And we can also use this studio to dub christian films. And for a lot of people, literacy can be a big barrier for accessing scriptures. So in scripture engagement, we want to try to minimize the barriers. So audio resources have been tremendously impactful. 

18:35
Marie
And in our work, we usually make those recordings in our studio, and you can save them on little micro sd cards and buy a little mp3 player for about $5. And people literally take them to their fields, when they go to work, when they’re living in their houses, working in their houses in the village, they put it on their windowsill and they play the music, and they have scripture playing or Bible oral Bible studies going out. And that’s been a powerful tool both for Bible study and evangelism. So I would say, number one, audio resources. Another area that we spend a lot of time on is developing Sunday school materials for children and adults that facilitate true sharing around the scriptures. 

19:23
Marie
And I think a model of teaching that is common in a lot of places in the world is that one person talks and everybody else sits there and listens quietly. And when the teacher is done talking, that’s it. So we’ve been trying to develop materials that really facilitate interaction and giving people the opportunity to read the word for themselves and learn to ask questions about it and share their ideas. And that’s been kind of revolutionary. And it’s been exciting to see that just very basic, kind of inductive Bible study materials have had a huge impact and growing influence in how people can use the word in church. And it’s been exciting for us to have the opportunity to work with about 100 different churches actually providing materials and then training people how to use the materials. 

20:23
Marie
So if you just develop materials and distribute them, you just cannot be sure they’re going to know what to do with them. So a key part of what we do, in addition to materials development, is training Sunday school teachers. Many of them are older teenagers, young mothers, and as well as church leaders and elders, how to use the materials, practice teaching so that they have confidence to use a new method. It’s a very new idea to be in a group and ask questions about the word and kind of sit, know, and wait for people to share their ideas. So it takes some intentional training and practice opportunities, but it’s been exciting to see the fruit that’s been bearing. I’ll pass the baton over here to mark. 

21:09
Mark
Yeah. So when were first involved in the particular project that we’ve been focused on in our work with LBT, it’s a good sized group of people in our part of the world, 600, 700,000 people, and spread across a few different countries. Our first kind of assignment, or first work was focused on preparing literacy, kind of a literacy program that could be rolled out in the various churches, in a certain network of churches that are churches that speak this language. And so we helped kind of develop what we would call a primer that could be used and then train some local teachers in how to use that, how to use it to teach, essentially, people that could already read the national language, how to read their minority language. 

22:03
Mark
And at the time that we started work, the book of Luke had been finished, and they’d already distributed, like, a booklet form of the Book of Luke. So the goal was really to allow people to be able to read that for themselves. But then we actually started after we kind of helped get this literacy program going and kind of scaled it up to the number of churches that were out there, we asked them, what is it that you would find helpful in your churches? What is it that you think you need? And so kind of in our scripture engagement work, a lot of it has just been responding to the needs that they express. And first need that they talked about was in the area of health, actually. They said, we have a number of health issues in the villages. 

22:50
Mark
We would like some very basic kind of booklet form of information about some of these issues. And so our team that we had been starting to work on this literacy program with, we contacted another organization and helped kind of adapt some literature into our language and got the stuff printed up and out there. And so addressing basic things like mothers and infant nutrition, things like women’s reproductive health, parasites and diarrhea and other things like that, preventative kinds of things, even. Actually, one of the books was focused on prevention of human trafficking or prevention of spread of HIV AIDS. And so those were some things that once we got those printed up, we got them out there, we got kind of the network able to kind of pass those on and talk about them together, share their information in their churches. 

23:50
Mark
So it was kind of about meeting the needs that they were feeling. And the next thing I think that they asked, or that when we asked that they know we would like, Marie was saying, resources for our kids that we can use in Sunday school. And so when we heard that, then we took what had already been produced for the Book of Luke and turned it into this kind of curriculum. About 30 stories that were illustrated that were large books, that were kind of flip books that a teacher could use in front of a large group of kids or even adults to share the story, clearly using the pictures as well as text. 

24:32
Mark
They could be both reading opportunities, practice reading opportunities, develop dialogue about the scriptures, and not only try to understand the meaning of the stories of Jesus, but start to apply them in their. So, audio resources, as Marie mentioned actually later on, were followed up by other kinds of digital resources, including an app on a smartphone that could actually carry the same content with illustrations, text, and audio, including not only the stories from the Book of Luke, but also even some sample answers to the discussion questions and whatnot. Just trying to make these resources things that people could access easily and use easily in their daily lives. 

25:25
Mark
Another resources that our team was part of developing was a songbook app, actually, and the group that we have been working with going back a few decades, had been developing their own songs, and they had collected, when we first started, over almost 200 songs. Our team helped get those songs recorded, and then also we helped with not only the printing of a songbook or hymn book, but then later on an app that actually held the songbook with the text and the audio going along with it. And that actually specifically for places where new churches were being planted, in fairly remote villages where they could learn some of the songs and begin to start to meet in homes and start to worship together. 

26:20
Mark
So something that would allow these smaller groups, newly forming churches, actually, to begin to use some of the resources that the larger church had been developing. So those are kind of some of the specific activities that our particular team has been working on in the field of scripture engagement. 

26:40
Rich Rudowske
So, yeah, I love the breadth of all of the different approaches, and some of them clearly directly pointed at breaking down barriers to scripture engagement, but some of them also clearly pointed at using the gift of language development to solve other problems of life. And a question I have is what you describe shows that there’s a substantial level of community engagement somehow. So how is it that you come to learn of these needs from the community or their desires and thoughts? Because it’s just great how you’re able to respond to them. Just curious how you learn about the partnerships that exist to facilitate that. 

27:14
Marie
Mark and I really think of ourselves kind of as bridges between resources and the community, and we ourselves don’t interact directly with the community all that much, but we are kind of behind the scenes working with a team of about eight people. Some of them are scripture engagement staff, others are representatives of the church, and they are the ones who really are the ears and the eyes on the ground and can hear. How are the local churches struggling? What are the issues that are challenging them right now? And what kinds of resources would help people both in their daily life and also into digging into scripture? 

27:57
Marie
So we have mentioned we work with a fairly large church network, and the leadership knows about the work of scripture engagement, and they’re the ones that really funnel to our broader team kind of the things that they need, the things that they feel would help the church. And we don’t really dive into the production of a new resource without consulting the wider community first, whether it be dubbing film or developing a new kind of Bible study track before finding out, is this something you would find helpful? Is this what you mean when you need a resource to talk about this? So really it’s super essential. 

28:38
Emily Wilson
It’s awesome. So you were saying that you’re not able to necessarily interact with the community all of the time or that there’s been fewer opportunities, but you have a lot of awesome, inspiring stories of lives transformed by scripture, by those scripture engagement materials and interacting in that way. Could you share some for our audience? 

29:03
Marie
Sure. We’d love to share a few stories. 

29:06
Mark
As Marie mentioned earlier, a big part of our work has been training, equipping both Sunday school teachers and pastors and elders from this network in how to use the resources, mostly Bible story focused resources. And during those training times, we kind of try to set up a feedback loop and some of the stories that we get through that loop really help us. And Marie maybe has one that she can share. 

29:39
Marie
Yeah, I’ll just share a couple of responses to some of the scripture engagement training our team has done for pastors in the area, and one was from a new pastor. His response to learning how to use questions to do group Bible study. He said, this workshop really helped me understand the Bible and this method that we learned about using questions together really helps us learn the meaning ourselves in such a way that we can remember it better. And studying as a group helps me understand the story better than reading it all by myself. And thank you. Another interesting story is from a pastor who attended a training and were doing some training on how to use a curriculum from the book of Exodus. 

30:27
Marie
And he said, oh, these stories hit me deep in my heart, particularly the story about God providing manna in the desert. And he says, I’m convicted that I haven’t been trusting God to meet my needs to the extent that on Sunday I’ve been asking my children to go out and make money selling things at the local market or on the side of the road instead of bringing them to the church with me. Even though I’m a pastor, he said. I wish I could redo the past years, he said, but now I know that God wants even children to have a day to worship and he’ll provide for us. He’ll supply our needs if we trust and obey him. 

31:10
Emily Wilson
That’s beautiful and generationally impacting that. It’s like God’s word and his relationship in the Old Testament with his people and how we see that in our lives, but then also bringing it into that level in the community of like, well, what is the practical application of this? And how do I want to model for not only my family and my community, but then as a pastor, he’s reaching out beyond just his small circle as people then share with others and have that modeling. That’s beautiful. 

31:50
Rich Rudowske
I really love the story about the lady who said she learned more being in a group than on her own, than that community aspect of learning, which is really when you read the scripture through that lens, you see that is how scriptures were learned. And historically, certainly it’s a gift that individuals can, but there’s a certain community wholeness and the give and take, the sharing together of the gospel. That’s a beautiful thing. 

32:12
Marie
I love that story and can also share kind of a neat testimony from one of the Sunday school teachers. 

32:19
Rich Rudowske
Cool. 

32:20
Marie
Through the scripture engagement program, we’ve been encouraged that many churches that never had any kind of a focus on children now do have regular Sunday school teaching for kids. And nearly a couple of thousand kids are now hearing the word of God every week. And children tend to be kind of a neglected people group in the area of the world where we work. And one of these teachers, at a recent teacher training, she said, every Sunday morning, she says, I wake up especially early and I dress in nice clothes because I want the children to feel special and to know I consider Sunday school to be our special time with God. 

32:59
Marie
She says I have to walk to church, and nearly every week people in the village shout unpleasant things to me as I walk along, such as, why are you all dressed up just to teach kids? What’s so special about them? Why are you a Christian anyway? We don’t need any more christians in our village, but I just keep smiling and walking, she says, because God’s called me to do that. And she said, sure enough, more and more kids from non christian homes are coming on Sunday morning. A lot of parents still try to keep them away, but after the parents go to their fields, the kids sneak to church on Sunday. And now some of the parents are coming to me and saying, thank you for teaching kids because they see that their lives are changing. They’re more respectful at home, they’re better behaved. 

33:48
Marie
So I’m seeing fruit in the lives of my kids and I just feel really blessed to be a Sunday school teacher. 

33:55
Emily Wilson
Oh, wow, awesome. 

33:57
Rich Rudowske
I want that lady to come teach my kids. 

34:02
Mark
Yeah, sometimes the stories actually come from the process in terms of when you’re working together to develop these opportunities for the word of God to impact people’s lives. It happens. And after the book of Luke, the story is from the book of Luke, our team is focused on the Old Testament. And that was really at their request. Our translation team actually had gone ahead and translated the book of Genesis. And so we developed a set of lessons based on stories from Genesis. And beyond that they said, well, hey, we’d like to continue. And so it wasn’t in the translation team’s plans to keep going in the Old Testament. So we said, well, we could focus on developing kind of some summary stories, not specifically translation, but kind of what we might call an oral storying approach. 

34:58
Mark
So we drew together a team of pastors, evangelists, and others to be a part of helping kind of develop these stories and summarizing them, actually, as we work together, taking them out and testing them. And one of the guys that we had helping us for that himself, is a very powerful evangelist, and he’s been involved in planting several churches in different village areas, not only among his own people group, but among other people groups as well. But this guy. So were focused on the Book of Exodus, which we’ve actually seen a very powerful response to the story of the Exodus. And as went through this process, it helps us remember and realize just how important that story even is for understanding Jesus work. And we don’t have to dig deeply into that. 

35:53
Mark
But we had been working on some stories, and one week in particular, were working in the capital city and had focused on the plagues. And so we had developed basically three stories from the plagues and the Passover. And after that, we would always take those, and everybody that was part of the work would take them home and kind of tell them in their local village. And part of it was just to tell them, and then to see if people could actually remember what they were hearing well enough to tell them back. And then also asking some basic questions like, what did you like about the story? Or what did you learn about God from the story? So this particular guy, this evangelist, so he decided on his way home to his village, he’d stop at one of his uncle’s villages. 

36:42
Mark
And this is an uncle that he’d actually shared the gospel with before, but using tracks in the national language and other things. But this uncle had never responded. And this was an older man who had actually had a stroke a couple of years prior to this and was reliant on his younger children to kind of get around, get to the bathroom and everything. But he went to the household, and our friend, the evangelist, he told the stories that we’d worked on together, and he was actually telling the story of the Passover. And so he was collecting the family’s response to the story. And it came around to this uncle of his. 

37:23
Mark
And when asked, what did you learn about God from this story, he kind of sat very thoughtfully and he said, I didn’t realize that the God that you’ve been telling me about was so great and so authoritative and had power even over a great king like this pharaoh. He said, I’d never realized that before. He said, I also recognized your God has great wisdom and mercy. Even so, our friend kind of took that and kind of said, well, those are very interesting observations. And he said, another thing you might see in the story, though, is even a great king and other people can sometimes harden their hearts against our God. And he said, you know, you can see from the story that’s something that you don’t want to do. 

38:23
Mark
At that point, this uncle really was kind of touched, and he said, I want to open my life to your God and I want to know his goodness, and I want to know if you can pray for me to see if your God can heal me. And so he said, well, let’s pray together. We’ll pray that you can walk. And so along with the other family members, he led a prayer. And fairly quickly, actually, this uncle said, you know, I really kind of feel a strengthening in my legs. And so he got up and he started to kind of walk around a little bit in the house. Our friend said, well, I’m going to leave you with more stories about our God and more stories about Jesus, who is the one who has brought us salvation. 

39:14
Mark
And he is actually the one who we call the lamb, whose blood can be in the story of the Passover, the blood that can protect us from danger. So he left these stories. He left, actually, an audio player with him that he could listen to the stories, actually. So it was a couple of weeks, he had the opportunity to get back and visit them again. And by this time, actually, this uncle was walking. He had been walking around his house. And on Sunday, it was probably a week or two after this encounter, he actually walked all the way to the church, which is on the other end of the village. It was about a mile away, actually. Everybody in the village saw what was happening, and they’d see this man on his way to turn and said, uncle, what’s happened to you? 

40:11
Mark
And he said, I have met God, and healed me. So, long story short, there were several other families in this village that came to faith and began to go to church in that village through the sharing of these stories and through kind of the prayers of faith of our friend. But part of kind of what we want to do with these Bible stories is make it something that people can actually keep in their hearts. And one of the things that we’ve tried to see is the kids that are learning the Sunday school stories. 

40:48
Mark
Part of the lesson is actually for them to retell the story and so that they can actually go out and that the word of God won’t be bounded by whatever print form or whatever, that people can actually tell these stories and that they can make the impact that only God’s word can make in other villagers in their setting, even if those people don’t make it into the churches. 

41:12
Marie
You’re talking about keeping stories in your heart. Just got a cute little story from a Sunday school teacher recently with her own family. Recently, they had learned the Ten Commandments in Sunday school and especially a couple of summary statements. Love your neighbor as yourself, and of course, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. And she was at home and she had given her own children some candy, and she saw that her children had gone outside the house and they were sharing it with their friends. And she was like, kids, I gave you this candy. Why are you sharing it? You’re giving it all away. And they said, well, mom, you taught us in Sunday school to love your neighbor as we love ourselves. 

41:49
Marie
So we’re just doing what you told us to do in Sunday school. She was like, oh, yeah, right. 

41:58
Mark
She said, I was ashamed that my children had learned the lesson better than I. 

42:03
Rich Rudowske
Faith of a child always comes through. 

42:06
Marie
Yeah, kind of fun. 

42:08
Emily Wilson
What words of encouragement? I mean, these are encouraging words for sure, but when you’re meeting someone and sharing your story and sharing the story of the language communities that you work with, what do you say to them to encourage them to be involved in partnering in prayer or by giving or if they’re feeling called to go? How do you talk about that with them? 

42:34
Marie
Yeah, that’s a good question. And it is such an encouragement. I do like the illustration of a bridge, how God allows us to participate by helping connect the truths of his word with the people in other places and just encouraging people. Even though a lot of our partners live on this side of the world, their prayers and their financial support, they form this incredible bridge and a pathway, really, for God to move even way across the world. It really is all about partnership. We each have our own little role, right? I mean, none of this can happen, none of the impact can happen without the whole body of Christ participating. All these amazing resources that we’re able to make available to people there and the training that’s done because people on this side have given sacrificially and generously to make that possible. 

43:35
Marie
In a part of the world where people really literally struggle to find enough to eat, many people do anyway, and raise their families and send their kids to school. So the partnership of resources is huge and the partnership of prayer, because it’s a spiritual battle when the word of God is going into places where it hasn’t been before. And in our setting, the people are very much immersed in the world of spirits and the spiritual reality. And there’s a lot of confrontation between the powers of darkness and the power of light. And prayer is absolutely essential because those who are, we all can’t be on the front lines. We’re not on the front lines either, but our training team, our local brothers and sisters, they’re out there bringing the resources to places where they’re needed. 

44:23
Marie
And without that backing of prayer, they’re out there in a pretty vulnerable position. So we really are so grateful for the partnership that people on this side of the world provide, and it’s neat that we each get to have a little piece in what God’s doing, both near and far. So, yeah, we’ve been blessed through tremendous sacrifice and generosity of partners on this side of the world. 

44:54
Mark
Yeah, but, yeah, realizing that this is God’s work and different people have different roles in it, but they’re all part of what God is doing. And yeah, we’re always encouraged by the faith of the folks that we work with. And we like to be able to encourage people in our sending country, in our sending churches with the faith that people have. And I think for ourselves, I know it can really increase our faith, and I think it can have that impact as well on folks here in the. Yeah, we really have been touched by the generosity of our partners here in the US and the really sacrificial ways that they have given toward God’s work. And, yeah, that is so important. It encourages our faith, too. Definitely. 

45:51
Rich Rudowske
Awesome. Well, it’s a privilege to be in partnership with you from our angle as well. And we certainly will continue to commit you and your ministry to prayer. And just want to say thanks also for being that key resource connector, God’s people in the place at that time. I know it’s more than you, and there’s a whole network of folks working. But just thanks for being available and serving in God’s mission in that way. And thanks for being with us today as thank you. 

46:15
Mark
Oh, thank you, guys. Yeah, it was our blessing. Thanks so much. 

46:22
Emily Wilson
So, as promised, Mark and Marie have such an inspiring and just motivating service in God’s mission. There were several times during the interview I felt myself tearing up. I’m amazed at what God is doing with people in hard to reach places that seem like hard ground, that he is working the soil, he’s working through his people, that they might know him and to be able to share love and light with others. 

46:56
Rich Rudowske
Absolutely. And I think it’s so critical to remember that we have the opportunity to be involved in God’s mission. And in this place, one of the greatest needs is your prayer support for missionaries like Mark and Marie and the folks that they’re working with in these language communities where Christianity is developing and growing stronger, but in situations that are sensitive. And so we invite you to get involved in prayer ministry with Lutheran Bible translators. That’s super easy. You can go to lbt.org and just scroll to the bottom of that homepage and you’ll find a place where you can sign up to receive a prayer calendar and pray for this ministry and lots of other ministries where God is at work through Bible translation. 

47:39
Emily Wilson
And if the Lord is leading you to support this ministry financially, I want to encourage you to reach out to us at communications@lbt.org and we’re going to be able to share with you how you can support Mark and Marie or the ministry group that they are working with. 

47:55
Rich Rudowske
Thank you for listening to the essentially translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible translators. You can find past episodes of the podcast@lbt.org slash podcast or subscribe on Audible, apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow lutheran Bible translators social media channels on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Or go to lbt.org to find out how you can get involved in the Bible translation movement and put God’s word in their hands. This episode of essentially translatable was produced and edited by Andrew Olson. Our executive producer is Emily Wilson. Podcast artwork was designed by Caleb Rotelwald. Music written and performed by Rob Weit. I’m Rich Radowski. So long for now.