Great is His Faithfulness

00:00
Susan Kaiser
God is so faithful in providing what it is that you need in every time and place, and so just being able to rest in that and then see what he does with you as a result. 

00:12
Rich Rudowske
This is the Essentially Translatable Podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible Translators. My name is Rich Rudowske. I’m the Chief Operating Officer here at LBT. 

00:31
Rich Rudowske
On today’s episode, welcome longtime LBT missionaries Dr. Jim and Susan Kaiser to the podcast to share some about their experiences and how they have seen God. 

00:40
Rich Rudowske
At work in the various locations and various stages of life in which they have served. Susan joined LBT first and earned the Master of Arts in linguistics from the University of Texas at Arlington. Jim came along later and also earned the Master of Arts in linguistics from University of Texas at Arlington and later the Doctor of ministry in Bible translation from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. Together they’ve worked with language communities in Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, and the exotic state of Michigan. Enjoy some great conversation with Jim and Susan Kaiser. 

01:15
Rich Rudowske
We are with Dr. Jim and Susan Kaiser today, talking about their work and ministry with Lutheran Bible Translators. So welcome to the podcast. 

01:24
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Thank you. It’s good to be here. 

01:25
Susan Kaiser
Thank you. 

01:26
Rich Rudowske
So before we get into some of the stuff to do with your ministry, which is long and varied, we’d like to have our listeners get to know you a little bit. Tell us about your background, Jim and Susan, what you previously did before beginning work with LBT, how you got involved in Bible translation ministry. 

01:42
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Well, I was an engineer with General Motors for about two years, and I made the transition to Bible translation. It actually started during college time. During that time, I got interested in missions and started talking to different mission agencies about serving with them. And they all told me the same thing, that they don’t really need a mechanical engineer to do missions. But several of them said, you might want to think about Bible translation work. People who do well in math and science often do well with linguistics and translation work. And I heard that from three or four of these that weren’t involved in that work themselves. And so I thought, well, maybe God’s trying to tell me something here. 

02:28
Dr. Jim Kaiser
So I eventually started checking out some Bible translation agencies and went on from there, took a leave of absence from my job and then took some training, enjoyed it, and went on from there. 

02:40
Rich Rudowske
So what got you interested in mission while you were doing this work as an engineer? 

02:46
Dr. Jim Kaiser
I think it was just hearing about the number of people yet who didn’t know about the Gospel and who lived in areas of the world where there were language barriers or cultural barriers that had to be crossed in order for them to hear about the Gospel, that someone had to do that for them to be able to hear what God had done for them through Jesus. And God just really put that on my heart, and I wanted to be involved with that somehow. 

03:15
Rich Rudowske
Okay. And so then you went through training, and you became a member of LBT in what year? 

03:21
Dr. Jim Kaiser
I joined LBT in 1983. 

03:24
Rich Rudowske
Okay. And prior to that, there was somebody already serving with LBT. Susan, tell us how you got involved in Bible translation ministry. 

03:34
Susan Kaiser
Well, I’d always wanted to be a teacher, I guess, and so that was my plan, was to go to college and become a teacher, which I did. I was attending Concordia College, St. Paul, in that direction. But even in high school already, I was interested. I had learned a verse in Confirmation. 1 Timothy 2:4, “God would have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” And so I kind of had that in the back of my mind all the while, but I didn’t know exactly what that would mean. Then, as a sophomore in high school, a family from Lutheran Bible Translators spoke in our church, and we sang the hymn, “Hark, the Voice of Jesus Crying.” And, of course, part of that hymn is, “Here am I. Send me. Send me.” 

04:20
Susan Kaiser
I really felt the Holy Spirit leading me to respond and say, “Lord, send me.” And it seemed like, since I wanted to be a teacher, that literacy would fit in with that. So that was kind of in my mind, although I didn’t really expect that I would do it right away. I expected that I would teach and get some experience. But each time I started to forget about LBT, it seemed like He sent someone else along to remind me that LBT really needed somebody. And so, directly from college, I then took a summer institute of linguistics to find out what it was like and if I would do well. And I don’t know that I necessarily did great, but I certainly did okay. And God provided the funds and everything, so eventually, I was able to serve in Sierra Leone in literacy. 

05:15
Susan Kaiser
So that’s how I got there. 

05:17
Rich Rudowske
All right, and what year was that you joined and then went over to Sierra Leone? Okay, so then somehow you two met. So tell us about that. And you met and had a joint assignment there in Sierra Leone. So talk to us a little bit about that. 

05:36
Susan Kaiser
Well, I knew that I needed a partner in order to go back because I wasn’t done with the project that I had started in Sierra Leone. And the best place to get a partner is to go back to school in linguistics, where we had been in Dallas, or actually Arlington. And I had ladies praying all over so that, even though I didn’t say a male partner, they all knew and were praying for me. So in comes this young man, and I’ll let Jim tell his part. 

06:11
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Yeah. I think when we first met, we both thought, well, this isn’t the right person. Susan seemed a bit older. She’s three years older than I am and seemed a bit older. And maybe I thought, well, she kind of dresses like my mother, and she thought I was this young guy who always ran around in unironed clothes and things. And so there wasn’t a lot of mutual attraction at first. But as we got to know each other and became friends through classes and things, there was an attraction. And we ended up getting married in 1985, early 1985, and then went overseas later that year. 

06:53
Rich Rudowske
All right. And that first assignment then was to Sierra Leone, to the Kono language community. Is that where you had already been working, Susan? 

07:01
Susan Kaiser
No, it was a different language group. Thankfully, the Lord provided someone else to return to the language group that I had been working in. 

07:08
Rich Rudowske
Okay. 

07:09
Susan Kaiser
So it was a new start for me, too. 

07:11
Rich Rudowske
All right. And so in 1985, you head to Sierra Leone and begin work in the Kono language. Had anybody been doing anything there before you got there, or are you the first ones from LBT? 

07:21
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Anyways, there was an earlier LBT team, the Laesch family, who had done some work there back in the 70s, but they were not able to stay working. One of their children became ill and they had to go back to the U.S. So it had sat for a while before we got there again. So we were kind of picking up the pieces and putting things together from there. 

07:46
Rich Rudowske
Okay, and you had a family there, too, is that correct? All of your children were born during your time in Sierra Leone? 

07:54
Susan Kaiser
Yes, all three of the boys were born there. Two of them were born at a missionary hospital about 8 hours drive away, and the last one was born 2 hours away in a diamond mining hospital. So that was a real experience. 

08:10
Rich Rudowske
So tell us some about your work with the Kono people in your life are there other memories that stand out from your time in Sierra Leone? 

08:18
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Yeah, we lived in a village that was at the end of the road, pretty much literally. We had no electricity, no running water, no telephones when we first went there. So it was living at a bit of a primitive level, but gradually were able to get solar power, got a hand pump that we could pump water up into a tower, and so we got gravity fed running water in the house and flush toilets and things like that. 

08:48
Rich Rudowske
Eventually, so that sounds like the engineers take on things. Susan, what were your memories? 

08:55
Susan Kaiser
Well, all I know is it was wonderful when we finally got to the point where we could flick a switch and turn on lights instead of having to light kerosene lamps or candles or something like that. We had a ringer wash machine that wasn’t too different for me. I grew up in a farm, and my mom had used a ringer. Of course, hers was electric and mine was a very noisy lawnmower-type motor, but at least I had some familiarity with it. 

09:23
Rich Rudowske
All right, so you worked in the Kono language area for how long? 

09:27
Dr. Jim Kaiser
We were able to stay in the area up until about 1991. And at that point, there was a rebel war that got started in Sierra Leone and that pushed us out of the Kono area and down to the capital city, where we continued working with the project up until 1997 when there was a coup. We had to leave the country at that point, went to Ivory Coast and continued working with the Kono project there up until 2002, when there was another military mutiny there against the government. And then at that point, we relocated back to the States. 

10:09
Rich Rudowske
All right, in 2002 and the Kono New Testament was completed sometime in that time. 

10:15
Dr. Jim Kaiser
2006 is actually when we finished it. When we were back in the States, I continued working with the translator by email, and then I also made about three or four trips a year. I would travel to Sierra Leone for about a month or so at a time to do checking work on the various books with a consultant. They would come and meet us there, and we would check through the books. 

10:40
Rich Rudowske
Okay, so after the Kono translation was complete, then you began working with a group called Aramaic Bible Translation. Tell us some about that work. 

10:49
Dr. Jim Kaiser
When we were finishing up the translation, actually, I was looking at possibly getting out of Lutheran Bible Translators at that point because we really didn’t feel up to going back overseas. We had felt pretty stressed out yet from our times with the war and the various things at that point. So I was exploring other opportunities. And that’s when Aramaic Bible Translation approached LBT about getting someone to work with a project that they had in the Detroit area for the Chaldean people. And since we were there living in that area, LBT asked if we would consider working with that project and the Chaldeans are a group from Iraq. They are a part of what would be called the Church of the East, which was the Persian church. 

11:37
Dr. Jim Kaiser
There was the Roman Catholic Church that was centered in Rome, and there was the Persian church that was centered in Iran and Iraq area. And they are descended from that Persian church that was there, the Church of the East. 

11:50
Rich Rudowske
Okay, so, yeah, in the Bible we hear about places like, of the Chaldeans, or we hear the Babylonians, or sometimes it’s translated as the Chaldeans in different prophetic books. Are these the same people or descendants of that same group connected somehow? 

12:05
Dr. Jim Kaiser
That part is a bit fuzzy. Some would say yes, others would say no, maybe not. They took the name on later when they split off from the Church of the East. And so it’s not clear how much of an actual tribal relationship there is with that. 

12:29
Rich Rudowske
Okay. And that the language is somehow related or there’s some ancient translation that the church has used to this point. 

12:36
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Yeah. Chaldean is what’s called an Aramaic language. It’s related to the language that Jesus would have spoken with His disciples. And their original Bible was the Pashita, which was an old translation done maybe three or 400 A.D. And so the church used that, but no one understood it except for the clergy, who had spent time studying it. And so it was kind of like in the US when the Catholic Church was only doing their services in Latin. That was what it was like for the Chaldeans, for many of them, where the Scriptures were only available within the old language. 

13:20
Rich Rudowske
Okay, so you worked with the Chaldean project until it published a New Testament, is that correct? 

13:25
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Well, the New Testament was completed before I became involved. I was working on the Old Testament with them, training a translator and working with him, and we worked on that up until 2012. 

13:39
Rich Rudowske
Very good. And then you were working on doctoral work, and somehow this possibility came up to engage in work in Ethiopia and tell us about how you got involved in Ethiopia and how you two sort of wrestled with the idea of going back overseas after some period of time. Yeah. 

13:57
Dr. Jim Kaiser
A pastor from Ethiopia, Reverend Burhanu, was looking online one day to look for help with Bible translation work in his area. He’s the translation coordinator for the Southwest Synod in Ethiopia, and he happened to run across Lutheran Bible Translators on the Internet. And so he decided to send an email to LBT and said, “Can you come over and help us with our projects?” And that has always reminded me a bit of Paul’s dream of the Macedonian man saying, come on over and help us here. But anyway, LBT ended up then exploring it a bit more and eventually asking us to go and help with the translation projects in that area. 

14:44
Susan Kaiser
And that wasn’t an easy decision, especially for me during the time in the States. That was really a gift, I think, because it enabled us to be in the U.S. at the time when our three boys were in high school and college, and I think they really needed that. They needed us to be there in that time of transition and so on. So that really worked out well. And when they were through with that is when this new assignment came up. And so we had to think through that and what it would mean. I think it was particularly hard for me. Perhaps I am not one that particularly enjoys change, I think. And it took me quite a while to accept the fact that were going back overseas. I kind of think. I thought were done. But anyway, eventually we got there. 

15:43
Dr. Jim Kaiser
We made three trips over, I made three trips over to do checking work with teams in Ethiopia before we actually moved. And one of those trips Susan came along on so that she could see also what Ethiopia was like and get a better idea of what we would be going into. 

16:02
Susan Kaiser
Yeah, we had been praying prior to that, especially me, to know what God’s guidance was. And it just seemed like the moment I got off the plane there in Ethiopia, I knew that’s what God wanted us to do. Even though my own self was fighting it, I knew that’s what God wanted. 

16:20
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. The last episode of the podcast, Dr. Boafo had this statement in there. It says, if you’re a Bible translation missionary, then you can’t just go home and do something else. You’re always a Bible translation missionary. So kind of illustrates that; the truth of that. So then the role that Jim was slotted in Ethiopia was translation consulting in Ethiopia. So I wanted to talk a little bit about translation consulting, what it is, why we do it just in Bible translation ministry. 

16:49
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Yeah. Consulting is a way of getting someone who has more experience involved with projects so that they can benefit from the experience that person has had and help to improve the translation. Some of translation consulting is training and advising. Some of it can be looked at as kind of a quality check on things, which helps to satisfy a lot of the publishing concerns that maybe organizations might have, that they want to be sure that it’s done in a good way and the consultant can come in and help to make sure that the translation has been done in a good way and give the teams advice as to how they can go about and improve the translation. With doing that, a lot of what I do is asking questions, asking teams to think about have you thought about this and how will people understand that? 

17:43
Dr. Jim Kaiser
And what does that mean in your language and what are the implications for that within your culture and just helping them to think through what it’s saying and how people will be understanding it and maybe adjustments that they need to make in the translation to take account of some of those things. 

18:02
Rich Rudowske
Yes. And so you worked, at least initially, with four or five different languages and have done work in others. And whenever I talk about translation consulting with folks, and I explain that some folks have these multiple languages, even dozen or more languages that they’re helping consult on. And the question I get asked is, “Well, do they learn all those languages?” or,  “How can they do consulting without knowing every single language they’re doing?” So how’s that work? 

18:27
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Yeah, it’s impossible for a consultant to learn all of those languages that we work with that way. But what usually happens is the team will make what’s called a back translation, where they will do a literal translation of what they have translated back into English or into another language that the consultant already knows if there’s another common language. And some of them can look like a word-for-word, interlinear kind of translation of what they’ve done, and then sometimes they’ll also do more free translation that gives more of a rendering of what it sounds like within their language. 

19:09
Rich Rudowske
Okay. 

19:10
Dr. Jim Kaiser
And those can be written where that gives a consultant a chance to look at the translation ahead of time and to develop questions and things so that when the consultant meets with the team, then they can go over those questions and work through that. Sometimes it’s also done orally where the consultant just asks the team during the meeting to give a translation back into English and both of those can help the consultant get a picture of what’s being said, and then he can ask questions based on that. 

19:47
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. So it’s a dialogical process that helps in a way. The translators, who are the ones who know the text the best, can sort of talk about and troubleshoot and unpack what they’ve translated and why they’ve translated it that way. 

20:04
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Right. They’re the experts in their language and they’re the experts in their culture. And so as a consultant, I can’t really say, well, this is what you ought to do. And that’s why a lot of my job is just asking questions that when I’ve seen in another similar culture, maybe that they’ve had problems with an area or people understanding, then that’s where I’ll probe a bit more and ask a few more questions to help them think about that and see what the implications are for what they’re translating. 

20:35
Rich Rudowske
All right. And then those, especially those first years back in Ethiopia when you guys lived down away from the capital, had served in member care in certain capacities. So tell us a little bit about member care or what you did to the extent you can, of course, and why that’s important. 

20:56
Susan Kaiser
Okay. I was down in an area where there were some missionaries that were fairly remote, and most of them were single women, so they were really on their own. So for me to just be in contact with them somewhat regularly, by phone, by email, whatever means possible, once in a while, we would be able to actually visit them in person. That was also helpful to them, just to see how they’re doing. To have someone for them to talk, to, share things with, that was a very important thing for them to have. We had one family with children, and sometimes you could find out different things. They could ask questions based on our experiences, because were to the point of being grandparents. So just those kinds of things, for women in general, to be able to ask questions or just to talk. 

21:57
Susan Kaiser
Women need, I think, opportunity to talk. So probably more of my role was in that area of being a sounding board, an encourager, that kind of thing. 

22:08
Rich Rudowske
Right. And this was not just like, actually, none of these were LBT missionaries. This is a greater service to the missionary community. 

22:16
Susan Kaiser
Right. 

22:17
Rich Rudowske
So then more recently, the two of you have moved to the capital city and begun working in an initiative in one of the departments of the Lutheran church, the Department of Mission and Theology. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on with that, Jim. 

22:32
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Yeah, it’s really an exciting and busy time with that. The church there is looking at becoming much more involved in their work in Bible translation. They currently have about 23 Bible translation projects that they’re involved in, and part of my work is helping them to manage those projects better, to improve the work that they’re doing with the projects. They’re also just developing a bachelor of theology program in Bible translation through the seminary there. And part of what I’m doing interfaces with that as well, with helping to select people for that training and to help guide that process through. 

23:21
Rich Rudowske
And in part of your preparation for that led to this, even though we didn’t know for your translation consulting work, too, was doctoral work that you did and you did some work researching. Well, the title of thesis is using online collaboration to produce relevant translation resources, which speaks some to the idea that resources are needed for broadening the involvement of folks that can work in Bible translation. That’s already broadening on its own, and there’s a cry for resources to be available to more than just the English-speaking world and to be more available in a timely manner. So you talk about relevant translation resources. Tell us a little bit about what you mean by relevant resources. As you did that research, what kind of stuff were you looking for? 

24:07
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Well, there’s so much information that’s out there. When you look at things that have been written about the Bible. I mean, each book has commentaries and commentaries that are pages and pages of things and some of that is helpful for a translator, some of it is not. When you’re translating, it’s maybe more helpful to theologians, but not helpful for a translator. And so the relevant resources would be resources that would be helpful for them as they are working to do translation. And they frankly don’t have time to read through five or six different commentaries to try and find all of those things. And many of them don’t have the training and background to be able to distill all of the stuff that’s in those different commentaries down into something useful that they can work with. 

24:58
Dr. Jim Kaiser
And so a relative help would be something that gives helps that are useful for them in their context, to be able to translate God’s word for their people. Even looking at things like Study Bibles that we have here in the US, the information given there can be helpful, but often it’s very fact-based. Things like Town A is 6.7 miles away from Town B, and that’s the footnote that you see in a Study Bible. And really, how does that help someone in another culture understand what’s going on in that particular story within the Bible or how to apply that within their life? 

25:40
Dr. Jim Kaiser
And so it’s looking at how to give information to people that isn’t just a bunch of facts and things, or that won’t be helpful to them, but how to give help to a translator so that he can put the things that are most helpful for his people there and take that into account. 

26:01
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. And you mentioned that some part of the problem is that the resources one could be out of date with biblical scholarship, maybe not practical, but also were written from a perspective that may not be helpful to Bible translators and even or from a Western theological perspective, which may not give a full scope of translation. So your research tried to set up a wiki method, this kind of crowdsourced idea of putting resources together. And so you wrote that it didn’t gain a lot of traction during the period of time that you did it, which was for a few months, that you tested out some things. Why do you think that was the case? 

26:40
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Well, there were a number of factors, I think, that led into it not being used so much. One is that it was a limited time I was doing it, and so it didn’t have a lot of time to kind of get known and build momentum. Another factor is just people who work in Bible translation are very busy people already, and it’s hard to get someone whose time is stretched to say, okay, take this extra time and go here and do some writing and editing on this website. Those, I think, were probably the two biggest factors. I think maybe there are different ways people have done this. Sometimes they have kind of what’s called a website champion, someone whose main job is to go in and work on that site and to develop material that others can interact with as well. 

27:30
Dr. Jim Kaiser
And then that makes it a bit easier because that person can afford to invest the time of drafting and developing and doing stuff that then others can react and work off of, which doesn’t take quite as much time. But the initial drafting and working that out is something that takes a good chunk of time. And I think just a lot of people didn’t have the time and energy available to put into that. 

27:54
Rich Rudowske
Sure. Yeah, no, it’s a huge endeavor and something to keep looking at, for sure. I think the Bible translation world continues to wrestle with how to one make materials available, but also how to involve a larger segment of the folks that need to be involved, how to find the right platform and tools and connectivity to do that. So just as you were starting to get in the groove in Addis at the DMT, then we brought you guys home due to the coronavirus outbreak and some of the uncertainties that surrounded that. I mean, at that time in the whole world, we didn’t know really that coming to the United States was any better than staying in Ethiopia. But we brought you back and you’ve been here in the States for a number of months and now planning to return to Ethiopia. 

28:45
Rich Rudowske
One of our first missionary teams going back. So talk about some of your thought process, and Susan too, about what goes into that decision, your hopes, your concerns as you wrestle with returning, even in the midst of a pandemic, to your home in Ethiopia. 

29:01
Dr. Jim Kaiser
There’s a lot of mixed emotions with it, I think, and thoughts and uncertainties just because the whole Covid situation, there’s so many different things that you read and hear about it all the way from COVID is no worse than the flu, to Covid is almost the black plague, and it ranges over that whole area. And you see all of that and have to filter through that and try and come up with something that seems to be true. I think for us, for me, it came down to ultimately our safety is in God’s hands, whether we’re here or over there, and there’s risk in life whether we live here or over there, and that the safest place to be is where God wants us to be and to be involved in that work. 

29:55
Dr. Jim Kaiser
And I guess at this point, for me it came down to it felt the best to be over there, that’s where God wanted us and that we could take reasonable care for our safety while we are there, even though if we would become seriously sick, they don’t have the same facilities there as we do here or as many of them resource wise. But ultimately our safety is in God’s hands. 

30:21
Susan Kaiser
You know, for me it means saying goodbye to kids and grandkids and that’s always the case. So, as Jim said, we needed to get back and do what God’s called us to do. So let’s get on with it. 

30:34
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. And even if, you know, it’s likely, of course, you’ve been working from home while you’ve been in the States, you may have to work from home there in Ethiopia. So what’s the difference in your mind for going back as opposed to just working from home here? 

30:50
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Well, I think it opens up the options of just better communication with people there. There are opportunities for face-to-face meetings, better with masks and proper social distance, of course, but that’s there. And I think it can also be from past experiences when we’ve gone through difficult times in countries that we’ve worked in. I think it can also be an encouragement to people there to have us come back, that it’s not so bad and they’re not at the not being abandoned by everyone, but that we can be there and help to contribute and stand with them in this. 

31:30
Rich Rudowske
That is so true and that’s a great perspective on it. So the two of you have been involved in mission work now for. I was trying to do the math of 35 years, give or take 30 to 35 years, depending on how we’re counting and who we’re counting here. So what is the role of the Bible in your lives? You both talked about some inspiration as young people, but now, after all these years of service, what is the role of the Bible in your lives and how does that play into your continued outlook and mission work? 

32:02
Susan Kaiser
For me, I’d say the Bible is totally your center. It’s where you look when you need guidance. It’s where you look when you want to remember how much God loves you and where you look when you need promises of his strength and provision. Just very important because of that. 

32:23
Rich Rudowske
Absolutely. 

32:24
Dr. Jim Kaiser
The Bible for me is the reference point to what is true and how to evaluate and build other things on in my life. It’s what I can come back to and rely on. And in a world that doubts truth and doubts anything being absolute true to me, that’s what the Bible is. It’s what I can know to be true and know what to be true about God and my relationship with him. 

32:54
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. What do you think that the church here in the West can learn from some of the folks that you’ve worked with over your years of missionary service? 

33:02
Dr. Jim Kaiser
There’s a couple things that come to my mind. One is we can grow in our understanding of the reality of Satan and his activity in the world. I think we in the West here tend to be pretty materialistic in our view of life. And people in Africa do have a very real knowledge of Satan’s activity in the world, and that’s something I think we can learn from. I think another thing is their persistence in the face of adversity that they often have to live very difficult lives just because they’re Christians. They can be outcasts from their village or their family and learning how to still hold on to their faith and persevere through that. That’s something that we really have not had to face here in the West. 

33:54
Susan Kaiser
That kind of relates to what I would say is that people’s faith, to me in the non-modern world, or however you want to describe it, they can’t attempt to lean on all the things that we attempt to lean on. We lean on our money, we lean on medicine. And most of them over there, they can’t lean on those things. People are poor. They don’t have the money to do what they want it to do. They don’t have medicines all the time. They probably can’t afford to get those medicines. So their faith is a very vital part of their life. They realize very intensely that God is in control, and they see the many ways that he does work and move in their lives to provide what they need and to help them to get well when they’re sick. 

34:51
Susan Kaiser
They see those connections, I would say, much more clearly than what we in the west do. 

34:56
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, that’s very true. So the two of you are unusual in this way that as missionaries, you both decided to move to an overseas location as relatively young, just out of school or just early in career, and then again as what we would call second career folks. So you had a period of time in the United States and then at a later stage in life, decided to relocate to an overseas location. What advice might you have for either young people or second career folks who might be considering overseas missionary service? 

35:30
Susan Kaiser
I would say because I went as a single missionary originally, there were times that were quite difficult, and so I definitely wouldn’t promise that it’s going to be easy as a single missionary. But God is so faithful in providing just what it is that you need in every time and place. And so just being able to rest in that and then see what he does with you as a result, I don’t feel like I had so much confidence at the beginning, but in spite of that, God did his thing and used me for his purposes. So I think that’s something that I could give to other single missionaries, not quite knowing whether they could do this on their own, because I really wanted to be married and felt like God was giving me a promise that I’d be married. 

36:27
Susan Kaiser
But I soon found out that promise was not to be answered before going to the field, but after. So God can do it. 

36:36
Dr. Jim Kaiser
I would add to that to just follow where God is leading you. He may put something on your heart that seems very difficult or out of the ordinary, but if you really feel that’s where God is leading you and wanting you to be involved, then follow that. I don’t think you’ll regret it. 

36:58
Rich Rudowske
Absolutely. So, Lord willing, at the time that this podcast episode is out and releases for listeners, you two will be in the air en route to Ethiopia. So, thinking about that, how can our listeners pray for you as you reengage in ministry in Ethiopia? 

37:19
Dr. Jim Kaiser
I think just praying for wisdom for us as we’re there and helping to work with the church as they develop their translation program there. Praying for us for good health during this time of COVID that God would keep us in His hands with that. 

37:38
Susan Kaiser
Praying for our readjustment. We’ve been there, so we know something about it, but now things have changed with COVID So exactly what that means is a little bit uncertain. We may have to do some things a little bit differently. And so wisdom in that area also would be very much appreciated. 

37:59
Rich Rudowske
Absolutely. All right, well, thank you so much for your time this morning. We’ve been talking to Dr. Jim and Susan Kaiser, missionaries to Ethiopia, heading back, likely in the air right now. So thanks for your time with us today and God’s blessings. 

38:11
Dr. Jim Kaiser
Thank you very much for having us. 

38:13
Susan Kaiser
Thank you very much. 

38:18
Rich Rudowske
Thank you to Jim and Susan Kaiser for being on the podcast and for sharing their wisdom and ministry experience. The theme that really came through for me in all of our conversations is the trust in the Lord’s leading that they have even in the midst of difficult and uncertain times. As they said, ministry comes with a certain level of risk. But when you know that your life and situation are in the Lord’s hands, you can step out boldly, knowing that while you don’t often know where you’re going, you always know who you’re following.

Thank you for listening to the Essentially Translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible Translators. Look for past episodes of the podcast lbt.org/podcast or find us and leave us a good rating on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

39:02
Rich Rudowske
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.

The Essentially Translatable podcast is edited and produced by Andrew Olson and distributed by Sarah Lyons. Our Executive Producer is Amy Gertz. Podcast artwork is designed by Caleb Rodewald. Music written and performed by Rob Veith. I’m Rich Rudowske. So long for now.