Mark & Patti November 2023 Prayer Requests

* Prayer is appreciated for Patti as she finishes up teaching a course online for new missionaries hoping to learn Quechua in the areas where they find themselves—three different Quechua languages. It’s been very stretching as she and Mark have had to develop materials for it.

* Pray for Mark as he continues to check both Old and New Testament Scripture translations.

Mark & Patti September-October 2023 Beans'talk

Download a printable copy of the September-October 2023 Beans'talk with photos.

A masterpiece

We recently visited the art museum on the campus of Oberlin College with friends. Since we tend to browse at different rates, we weren’t always in the same gallery together. Mark called me back at one point to be sure that I had seen some of the fine detail. Each tiny brush stroke came together to depict delicate lace as it folded over itself. It was an impressive display of careful painstaking work, and then repeated thousands of times throughout the painting to make the whole.

Translating the Bible is a bit like painting a masterpiece. We choose each word carefully (over 62,500* unique words per Bible), crafting and sculpting each sentence so that the message is clear, natural, and exact. But instead of the outcome being a painting which sits in a museum, we have a translation of God’s word to reside in people’s hearts and minds, encouraging, convicting, and transforming.

Giving a hand

In three different places in Peru, in three different Quechua languages, five young missionaries are at work, smack dab in the adventures God’s called them to. Learning the language is a huge challenge and they need all the help they can get. So, one day Mark said to me, “Hey, what do you think about offering them a course over how Quechua languages work? You would do a great job!”

We were taught a similar course when we first started, and it was a huge help. So, with Mark’s help to re-work past course material, just the other day I finished teaching the first three days of class. It’s been very challenging, to say the least. In addition, there’s the challenge of doing this over the Internet. We hope it will help others as much as it did us.

Family updates

Jeremiah, our grandson with leukemia, received his bone marrow transplant on September 13th. Just a few hours after it arrived by plane it was making its way into his body. The first couple of days have gone well. Now, it is a waiting process to see how well his body takes what it received. Meanwhile, Jeremiah is suffering from typical yet painful symptoms that make it difficult to eat or swallow. Eventually, those issues should clear up. 

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Mark & Patti September 2023 Prayer Requests

* Mark has been asked to join a trial for a new linguistic computer program designed to adapt Scripture from one related language to another. Pray for him as he works on setting up a couple Quechua languages for the trial. Meanwhile, the teams he consults for are working to respond to the notes he made on their drafts of Scripture.

* On September 14, their grandson, Jeremiah, is scheduled for a bone marrow transplant. There is a lot of preparation that will require him to be in the hospital ahead of that date. Mark and Patti plan to travel to Charleston, SC, the last half of this month to support the family and help with Jeremiah's siblings. Thankfully, Mark's work is portable. Pray that Jeremiah’s procedure can be done as scheduled and that it will be successful, with minimal side effects.