We could really use some prayer, right now. There is an overabundance of circumstances that point to the likelihood of the enemy trying to cut off our supply lines in some sort of spiritual war turned physical. There is no way the Good News of Jesus Christ can be stopped by this, but I believe that we need to be active in prayer and in standing firm in the authority and responsibility granted to us by Jesus Christ to overcome these things. Some help agreeing with us in prayer and holding onto the promises of God on our behalf would be greatly appreciated. Here are a few concerns:
- Heavy rains and flooding have caused a bridge to be closed between us and Kainantu (where we could get on the Highlands Highway). There is no alternate bridge. There is no real alternate road (but there is a long motorcycle trail and a 4WD trail that goes through the river (not over it). This makes it harder to get supplies (like fuel and food) that are normally trucked in. The government has been informed of the outage on this national road, but higher priority road disasters (land slips on Daulo Pass and Kassam Pass), coupled with depleted funds from earlier repairs due to floods in other provinces make it unlikely that this will be fixed quickly.
- A man named Yanis Manki claims that because the creek that our community draws water from gets water drained from his land (with a valid government permit), he wants more money in compensation for that water. He got tired of waiting for the courts to act, so this morning, he took a mob of people past our guards to disable our water intake, in violation of a court order. Remember, this is in the rainy season, with about 29 inches of water in the last month falling out of the sky for free, and the issue has nothing to do with him needing more water. He clearly doesn’t. It would just run down the stream, into the river, past the eroding foundations of the afore-mention bridge. He just wants more money from the “rich” missionaries that what they offered him. Much more. We get plenty of drinking water from our roof, but this is the water we use to flush toilets with and do much of our washing.
- Our Internet access via satellite has been in a slow, intermittent, degraded state for about 3 weeks. In addition, our ISP just cut off access to the port I needed most to manage the web/ftp/mail server that hosts eBible.org and 40 other domains. Shortly after that, the server went down.
- There is more, like the still-missing engine on the airplane in the picture, the PNG visa situation, and adoption paperwork hassles, but I don’t want to whine, just motivate you to pray.
Now, it is a good time to remind ourselves of the GOOD NEWS.
- We win! Jesus Christ always causes us to triumph!
- We have eternal life.
- We get to live with God in Paradise.
- We will accomplish what Jesus sent us to accomplish, including getting the Word of God to more people in their own languages.
- We still have supplies, communications, etc.
Praise God!