germany – A Liddle Good News

Planes, trains, and automobiles

For months, I have told people that I knew what I was going to write next. It’s true. I did know. It is also true that, for months, I put off writing what I knew I would write. Let’s put it down to this dizzying visit of ours to the U.S., shall we? Buckle up and return those trays to their upright positions, and I’ll share what we’ve been up to.

As I indicated back in July, we started our visit at the end of August by flying from Frankfurt to Atlanta. That’s not our normal routine, but we were to pick up a loaner vehicle from a generous church in the South Carolina Lowcountry—classic Southern hospitality boosted by the Holy Spirit, or perhaps the other way around. After visiting friends in the Charleston area, we headed north to Pennsylvania, dropping off our younger son outside of Camp Lejeune so that he could follow later with his brother. (Aww….)

A fitting chariot for our stay. We are supremely grateful for the comfort, which has greatly eased the stress of travel.

On Labor Day weekend, we had a small family reunion with my mother and sisters. After a few weeks of getting reoriented and helping the lad get moving toward life on his own, Katherine and I drove to Duncanville, Texas, for our first church visit (25 September) and meetings with Katherine’s global library colleagues. I also dropped in on my old IT crew.

A pause from driving lessons along the Susquehanna River.

My wife and I parted company at this point. Katherine remained in Texas for a few more days; to help our son further, I flew to Philadelphia and took trains to Lancaster. (Now the title is fully justified!) In that time, Katherine received word of a serious illness in the family, so next she drove to Colorado. I flew out in the first week of October and rejoined her. From there, we drove to St. Joseph, Missouri, for our second church visit (9 October)—and then back to Colorado.

As in this picture, taken in central Kansas, it seemed like there was always another road for us to travel.

From Colorado, we flew to Orlando, Florida, to take part in a week-long seminar at Wycliffe USA called Connections. There, we learned how to transition from crazy lives overseas to crazy lives stateside, and we met some of the people who manage some of the crazy on our behalf (read: finance and healthcare). The time impressed on me that each of us there, like the figures described in Hebrews 11:13-16, is still looking for a place to call home. In the meantime, we wander the earth, hoping for our God to put us to good use.

At Wycliffe USA. The pavement reads, “Declare His glory among the nations.”

We returned to Colorado. After a few more days there, including some with the older lad, I took the car and headed alone to Pennsylvania, leaving Katherine with her family.

After stopping for a day in Missouri, I journeyed straight to our third scheduled church visit (6 November) in Media, Pennsylvania. Then I returned to Lancaster. A few days later, Katherine flew to Harrisburg and was picked up by all three of her guys. We left our two rascals alone long enough to make our fourth church visit in Springfield, Pennsylvania (13 November).

The next week, Katherine and I drove down to Annandale, Virginia, for the fifth church visit in our schedule (20 November). Thankfully, we got a break in our travels for Thanksgiving. (Did you see what I did there?) We also got to spend time again with both of our sons. Such times make for a happy mama … and papa.

In Colorado, it was nice to *walk* for a change.

Our sixth and final church visit took us back to the D.C. area, in Fairfax, Virginia. We returned to Lancaster, but Katherine has flown to Colorado again, leaving me alone with this keyboard. (She’ll be back. I hope.)

Over all these trips, we’ve seen a lot of faces—the faces of family, friends, and a host of supporting sisters and brothers in Christ. We have also seen a lot of miles, according to the history gathered by my phone. (Yes, I let “them” keep track of me—someone probably should.) It reports that, since we began our journey to the U.S., I have travelled 10,466 miles by plane, 76 miles by train, and 8,118 miles by car. That’s an average of about 167 miles each day. For the past four years, we lived less than one mile from our offices in Germany.

Here are our faces, more or less. We took more pictures at rest than on the road. Huh.

During most of this time, Katherine has also been attending to her study program in Library and Information Science. She loves it, and she’s doing great—as if any other result was possible!—but it has added a layer of intense activity to everything else. Katherine will have a break from these studies until we get back to Germany next month. She’ll be far more settled next semester, but I know that she would appreciate prayers to the Lord our God for sharpness of mind and stamina.

I want to close with an observation. We returned to a country different from the one we left in 2018—and the churches reflected the changes. The situation reminded me of that of the Jewish exiles who returned from Persia to their homeland: they didn’t all go back, rebuilding took a long time, the results weren’t like “the glory days”, and they seemed to be surrounded by foes. Everyone was discouraged. But in a vision, the prophet Zechariah was told:

It is not by force nor by strength, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.

and then:

Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin ….
Zechariah 4:6-10, NLT

Don’t lose courage. Don’t lose hope. Let’s look to the One who can achieve far more than we can on our own. Under His faithful care and yours, Katherine and I will return on yet another plane to Germany, where we will continue our ministry with Wycliffe. We had no fixed home here, and our home there will be different from the ones before. Please pray for our journeys in this world, and we will pray for yours.

A pretty picture from the end of a day, for the end of your reading, because you made it this far.

Another end to waiting, but better

A few months ago, a member of Wycliffe Germany came to me bearing a thick sheaf of paper. She is one of several people around the center who have worked in Tanzania, as Katherine and I once did. However, her work there is ongoing—she serves as a consultant to a cluster of projects in the south of the country. One of the languages in the project is that of the Safwa, who live in the mountains around the city of Mbeya.

In the 2002 Wycliffe publication From Akebu to Zapotec: A Book of Bibleless Peoples, the Safwa people have an entry under, of all things, the letter S. The entry is accompanied by an artist’s rendering of a photo taken during the sociolinguistic survey of the Safwa language in 1998. Katherine and I took part in that survey. We found that the Safwa had a strong sense of identity and preferred their language to Kiswahili in daily use. The Church was present, but its message and ministry was hindered by the use of Kiswahili. Those of us who surveyed the language concluded that the Safwa would surely benefit from Bible translation, but we also felt that such a project would be a long time coming.

Let’s come back now, 24 years later, to that sheaf of paper. What my colleague Andrea presented to me was a draft printout of the New Testament in Kisafwa:

The cover page of the draft New Testament in Kisafwa

My friends, this day was one of the most significant of my entire life. Later that day, I wrote to others that, if I did nothing else worthwhile in my life, the knowledge that these people would receive the Good News in their own language would be enough to content me. Praise God with Katherine and me for the proofing and the publication of this good work!

The rain and snow come down from the heavens and stay on the ground to water the earth.
They cause the grain to grow, producing seed for the farmer and bread for the hungry.
It is the same with my word. I send it out, and it always produces fruit.
It will accomplish all I want it to, and it will prosper everywhere I send it.
Isaiah 55:10-11, New Living Translation

Last month, Wycliffe Germany had its annual member meeting, which gathers together all those who are present in the country for the purposes of enjoying fellowship and conducting business. Yours truly ran the technical components of the main session, freeing others to give their full attention to their friends and to the meeting.

My command center for the *Mitgliederversammlung*

Next month, Katherine and I will be returning with our younger son to the U.S. for a 4 1/2 month home stay. We will help him settle into life and work, now that he has finished his schooling and a gap-year program. Moreover, we will spend long-missed time with our families, friends, and supporters. Our schedule is still taking form, so if you live in one of the following states and are interested in getting together, please let us know! We’ll arrive in Georgia, pick up a car in South Carolina, and then drive to Pennsylvania. From there, we will spend time in Texas, Missouri, Colorado, and Virginia, before leaving again from Atlanta.

We hope / plan / expect to return to Germany in mid-January. When we come back, we won’t come back to the house we’ve been renting since 2019, but rather to a apartment. An empty nest. When you pray, please ask the Lord our God to bless us with a great home stay, our son with a good start to the next phase of his life, and our ministry with sufficient support in prayer and finances to assure our next term of service. If you want to be part of that, you can join us! None of what we do would be possible without you!

An enviable display of wisteria at the botanical gardens in Marburg

“Scotty, I need more power!”

This phrase has been familiar to many for decades now. In my work, I don’t need quite that much power, but power runs through everything that I manage. Over the past several months, several of the challenges facing me center on power. Or the lack of it.

When a device needs consistent, reliable power, it often gets connected to an uninterruptible power supply, or UPS. Servers and core network equipment like routers and switches fall in this category. Last year, the UPS connected to our main servers developed a fault and quit. Its failure didn’t do any lasting harm, but it was not a happy situation. This year, I acquired and installed the replacement.

The new UPS servicing the main server room.

As life would have it, at just about the time I had this UPS running, the one connected to our backup server and the internet connections also failed. It, too, needed to be replaced. After each failure, I was thankful that we have very few power outages here in this part of Germany and that I didn’t have to worry too much about not having immediate replacements. The second unit’s delivery was delayed a few weeks by the global supply chain problems.

Around the Wycliffe and Karimu campus, one can see the discus-shaped Wi-Fi access points that I installed for staff and guests. As I mentioned in the linked post, the devices get both data and power from the switches to which they’re connected. Our desk phones work the same way. Well, most of them do. Some of them are connected to a switch that I haven’t been able to replace and which can’t provide power.

The green cables connect to a power adapter for the nearby Wi-Fi device.

The phones wind up having two cables—one for data, and one for power. The Wi-Fi device needs an adapter between it and the switch that adds power to the line. The situation leads to inefficiencies in power and management. Inefficiency … gross.

In something of a reversal, several Wi-Fi access points have lost their ability to detect that power is being provided to them by the switch. The chip doing that job has failed, I suppose, but the rest of the device still works. As a result, I’ve needed to add adapters to their lines and “force feed” them.

These “Power over Ethernet” adapters add power to the data cables.

Again, this is an inefficient situation, but at least I can work around the deficiencies. I ordered replacement equipment back in January, but it took months for much of it to arrive. The very last devices in the order should come this week. Once again, the shortage is to blame.

The last mention for power takes us outside. With increasing frequency, we have guests coming to the conference center with electric cars. To our mutual benefit, we have installed a charging station in the parking lot.

As with almost everything these days, the station needs an internet connection in order to communicate with whatever system is managing access and billing. That’s why I’m involved. You know, I never thought that I might work at a filling station one day. 😉 Have I mentioned the global supply chain problems? Yes, they affect this project, too: the charging station in the photo is an interim model delivering juice until the model we ordered is back in stock.

These situations made me think of Jesus’ words in John 15:1-8. Among those are these:

“Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing.“
John 15:5, NLT

Without clean, constant power from the UPS, the servers turn off. Without the right switch or adapter, the Wi-Fi drops out. Without a charging station, the electric car will just sit in the parking lot.

Jesus is the source of power for the one who believes—and who stays connected. His power is pure, his power is eternal, and his power is always provided in the right manner and measure. He has no supply problems. You simply cannot go wrong by connecting to him.

Our service to Wycliffe is powered in part by people whom God has empowered to give and to pray. Are you one of those people? Katherine and I are grateful to you for being a part of our power grid! I’ll sign off now with an excerpt of the blessing given in Hebrews 13:20-21:

May he produce in you,
through the power of Jesus Christ,
every good thing that is pleasing to him.
Hebrews 13:21, NLT