As young recruits Sally and I were eager to get to the field and begin our ministry with Wycliffe Bible Translators.

We imagined exciting moments of New Testament dedications, of people receiving their own copy of their Scriptures, of hearts finding joy in discovering the God who loves them and speaks their own lan-guage.

I know how grateful I am for the Scriptures I have. I could not imagine what it would be like not have God’s word for me, not to enjoy reading, meditating and sharing time with Him each morning.

And so we wanted to share this joy in obedience to the commission given by Jesus and to the personal call on our lives.

How blessed we were to raise our family in the Peruvian Amazon, in an environment of adventure, lives filled with purpose, promoting the translation of the Bible.

Wycliffe Missionaries have been working in Peru for 60 years. And what kind of results can we point to? What are we celebrating?

Our next year of ministry will be from the US where I will continue as the Publications Coordinator for Scripture in North, Central and South America.

Recently Sally and I went to Dallas to review the archive of 102 New Testament publications ranging from Alaska to Argentina. We were able to find the digital files for fifty of them. My next step will be to process them to make them available on the internet for people to read, download, or order a printed copy. This is the exciting next step to making God’s Word available to all in the language that serves them best.

We seldom thought about what our ministry might be after Peru. But before we knew it we were making decisions about closing our home, disposing of our things, turning in our visas and making final preparations for leaving the country we had served in for almost twenty years.

We landed in the US and descended on Loris and her family for a couple months as we made plans for our next phase. Jonathan is registered at Lee University and is preparing for college life and living far from home. We bought a car for ourselves and for Laura as she heads back to her second year at Moody Bible Institute.

Loris and Mo are holding down the fort living in our home in South Carolina. Loris is working as a nurse at a dialysis clinic. And that leaves Ondrej who is in his third year of a Bachelor of Science program at Appalachian State U. He has a long term plan to study physics in a Doctoral program at MIT. Ondrej and Jessica are still getting used to being parents of Macaiah, going on 2 years old.

We will make our way to Winnipeg to see my family, visit my home church, and attend the wedding of my nephew. From Winnipeg we will journey to Sally’s home town of Akron, Ohio where we will serve part time on the missions staff of The Chapel. While living as missionaries in residence we will continue in the publications role with Wycliffe for the Americas. Even now I am busy managing the Web project in be-tween doing desk top publishing for projects in Colombia, Peru, and other countries.

Thanks for supporting us in the Work of Bible translation. This coming year we anticipate the completion of four New Testament projects along with Bible Stories Books for four Quechua languages in Peru. In the rest of the Americas there are five NT projects in process, one complete Bible, and several more smaller Scripture portions. This is a very productive year. May the Lord be blessed through the minis-try of His Word reaching the hearts of His people.