We hope that God blesses your families as you pause to remember how he breached the chasm between Heaven and Earth to be our Savior in the most vulnerable of forms. As usual, God's way was not our way and was better than anything that we could have imagined. We praise Him and thank Him for the example and eternal salvation that he gave us through Jesus.
Thank you for all your gifts and prayers that have allowed us to serve the people of Papua New Guinea these past 7 months. Having God's word in a language that you can understand is powerful; and God is moving His word deeper into the hearts of His people here!
We had the chance to witness this firsthand today. Our village church hosted a Christmas Day service that included three other churches from neighboring communities. Two of the villages had not worshipped together for over 6 years—since there was division and bloodshed within one village. Note that they don't live in communities of strangers like us, these were brothers fighting brothers. The pain goes deep.
This Christmas Day service was one of reconciliation though. They even admitted that they didn't know how it was going to go, but they all gave God the glory for the healing that He brought. God did it!
Praise the Lord that they have His Word in their language and through it He is changing hearts and healing families and communities. He is redeeming the people of Papua New Guinea for Himself!
Thank you for being a part of what God is doing here!
Much Love and Merry Christmas,
John, Kristi, Nori, Banner, and Millie Craig
And for those of you that are interested, here are a couple of pictures of me making some temporary repairs to the church building prior to the Christmas Day service.
The roof is in the process of collapsing, but we were able to slow it down for now. We are currently gathering resources to replace this building as early as possible in 2016. We will use as many local trees and materials as we can, but we will still need to get other things like concrete and metal roofing. If you would like to help, send me an email: john_craig@wycliffe.org
The biggest thing will be prayer though; we will have some distinct challenges with material transport that we need God's wisdom for in particular. Thank you!!!