A Liddle Good News – Page 27 – The Wycliffe ministry of David and Katherine Liddle

The winds of change are blowing

I’ll just cut to the chase, and then fill in behind that.

Yesterday, Katherine and I officially accepted an invitation from Wycliffe Europe to begin working with them next year. We will leave Dallas, and I will join their small IT staff – Martijn de Vries and Ken Haugh – who are working on expanding their operations.

There are 20 Wycliffe organizations in Europe. Each of these is smaller than Wycliffe USA but no less active in recruiting people for Bible translation. Some of the countries also have active translation projects. Presently, Martijn and Ken support the smaller Wycliffe offices, such as Wycliffe Hungary and Wycliffe Romania. A few of the larger ones have been able to recruit their own IT staff, but some have as few as 2-3 members in the main office. Rather than go to the effort and expense of establishing on-site IT services, Wycliffe Europe will develop a central point for such services at its office in Holzhausen, Germany (see map).

With Wycliffe’s efforts growing at a rapid pace in Africa as well, there are also increasing needs for computer help across the continent. The people and offices in Africa face the same challenges in Europe – it’s often difficult to recruit or fund staff to provide services locally. It’s also hard for these people to schedule help from the U.S. or the major centers in Asia because of time zone differences. Therefore, Wycliffe Europe has been asked to increase their capability to provide timely help to these people, too.

Ken Haugh and I have known each other for a few years. We worked very closely together on choosing and setting up an online help desk system for Wycliffe members to use around the world. At the time, he was assigned to JAARS and living in Waxhaw, North Carolina. After the project became well-established, he and his wife took up their present assignments with Wycliffe Europe.

Toward the end of June, Ken approached me with the question, “Have you ever given thought to returning overseas?” He had no idea that the thought had been developing in our minds and hearts for quite a while!

It didn’t take much prayer, conversation, and deliberation for Katherine and me to be convinced that God was the author of this invitation. We’re both very excited at the prospect of getting more closely involved in meeting the needs of Bible translation. And I’m thrilled to finally be making use of my college major … German!

Our hope – if it is the Lord’s will – is to be situated in Germany in time for the boys to begin the 2010-11 school year there. If we live in the same area as the Wycliffe offices, then J and C will attend a local German grundschule. If they are not able to learn German quickly enough to do that, then we may move to southwest Germany so that the boys can attend the Black Forest Academy as day students. In that case, I would periodically make the four-hour trip to the office to take care of matters that cannot be resolved remotely.

There’s going to be a lot more to share with you over the weeks and months to come, and we have a lot of work to do to get ready. Please start praying now that we’ll find a buyer for our house when the time is right – that’s probably the biggest item on the list!

Up and running again

Four weeks after the theft in our office, I now have the replacement MacBook set up to my liking. Almost.

The delay wasn’t due to any problems with insurance claims or police reports. Most of the time, I’ve simply been too busy to pull it out of the box and begin working on it. During the past three weeks, much of my efforts have been focused on interviewing and hiring two people to help us with our email migration project.

Together with a volunteer from Wycliffe Associates, they will make up a team to work on as many of the smaller accounts as they can handle in the next two months. We spent the last week walking through the process and covering the key terms and concepts within the world of email. I stop when I see that their eyes are glazed over. And I start doing what Jesus did — speaking in parables to help get my point across.

And the fallout from the theft? Well, all the other victims of the robbery are also working on new computers now, and I was able to use our backup system to restore their work quickly. There wasn’t much data that was lost, and I don’t think that anyone has seen evidence of identity theft attempts. I know that the police are still working the case, but there’s no information that I can pass along here.

There will certainly be changes that we make on the campus and on the computers that our members are using — particularly the laptops. Presently, I’m trying to make sure that I’m comfortable with our standard for data encryption, TrueCrypt, and applying it to the email on my computers. Keep those bad guys out!

You can’t take it with you anyway

Last night, our office was robbed — as well as several others across the International Linguistics Center. The thieves broke a window near my desk, and they stole all of the laptops that they could, including the MacBook that I use. Argh. Two other buildings were broken into in a similar fashion, and we don’t know yet how many laptops, monitors, and projectors were taken. As I write this, we’re working from a conference room while waiting for the fingerprint team to show up. Ugh.

The “positive” thing is that the thieves may have made some mistakes in leaving evidence such as fingerprints and footprints. As you work and go through your own day, please pray for the capture and arrest of these criminals — as well as for the recovery of the stolen equipment.

In the end, though, I remember that none of this stuff is that important: “Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.” (Luke 12:33, NIV)

The people on this campus are working hard to give people around the world the opportunity to gain that treasure. If you don’t have that treasure for yourself — if all you have are the things of this world — then look to the man who made the statement above, because he’s the only one with the key to that treasure.