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by | Feb 25, 2021 | Family Updates

Tuesday morning February 2nd I got up early and left with the pilots to go to the hanger in town. The weather was OK that day so we left Goroka shortly after 8 am and were able to land in Malaumanda before 10. There were a lot of people lining the airstrip and a lot of familiar faces. Unfortunately, some of the people who were waiting for the plane planned to leave. More on that later.

After shaking a lot of hands I made my way down to my house together with some of the church leaders. The guys have been helping me open up the house for years now so it didn’t take any time at all for me to get things set up again. I did have some issues with the solar system but by the end of the second day, we had that sorted out.

One thing that I noticed immediately after arriving was that there was a sickness going through the community. It wasn’t covid but there were a LOT of people who were miserable with a cold, cough, and occasional fever. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any medicine in there to help with their symptoms.

For most of the week, I spent talking with the leadership guys as well as some of the families in the church. It was pretty obvious that the church community was fighting more than just a cold. They were fighting a bit of spiritual apathy. All of us know what this is like, right? I heard time and again something like ‘my heart is cold’. It was great to be able to encourage them to not forget to spend time in God’s Word and in prayer. They know this but just needed the reminder.

I also spent a lot of time with one of the pastors, Jim. He is a gem! I love his heart for the Lord and for ministry. My concern for him is that the work of pastoring the local body is a bit more than one man can handle. We do have one other pastor but he was one of the guys who left on the plane when I arrived. From all accounts, he has gotten distracted by all sorts of other activities which take away from functioning as a pastor. I really wanted to spend some time talking with him about this but didn’t get the chance.

On Sunday I was able to enjoy a good time of worship with the believers there. I enjoyed hearing them sing and pray again. I shared from Romans 6.1-14 which was fun. There is something about teaching the Malaumanda believers that is more enjoyable than other types of teaching situations.

Let me finish off with this. I was really wanting to get an accurate idea as to how the church is doing. I had an idea from my previous trips that there are some issues that need to be addressed concerning their relationships; especially their marriages. This came up again during this trip and helped to emphasize the need for some more teaching in this area. Now I just need to schedule some time to prepare the lessons.

Thanks so much for all of you who so faithfully pray for us and give to support the ministry that we have here. We have been overwhelmed by your part in our lives.

In Him,

Eric and Judith, Stephen, Daniel and Timothy

Top left: Mobe is a good friend of Judith’s and helps out a great deal with the ladies’ Bible study. Top Right: Yowan is a brother in Christ who I spent some time chatting with. Bottom Left: Lepasa is an old lady who loves Jesus. She can barely see but she would still walk down to my house to chat. Bottom Right: Kabo and Fuali are dear friends that serve in the church.
This is a short video of my recent trip into Malaumanda.
This is Jim and Selina and their 3 children. He is a young man but a very faithful pastor. We are working together with him to see more men trained to be pastors.

Prayer and Praise

  • Praise that the boys are done with 5 weeks or so of school and are doing mostly OK with their studies.
  • Pray for Eric as he is in the midst of his second orientation class. I am still working with some of the missionaries from the first class so this is an added challenge.
  • Praise that another 34 or so missionaries arrived yesterday and are now in their 2-week quarantine. Some of these missionaries are new so we will be starting a 3rd Orientation class in March. We’ll have 3 sets of students at different portions of the program so Pray for us as we seek to prepare them for life and ministry here.
  • Praise that we can be here in PNG with virtually no covid related issues; no lockdowns and relatively few known cases in the country.
  • Pray for the final formatting work to be done on the Malaumanda New Testament.
  • Pray for Judith as she is balancing her time in the clinic with her time helping Stephen with his Spanish elective and then also helping me with orientation.
  • Pray for Alen, one of the pastors. He seems to be easily distracted these days and the church really needs him to be there in the village pointing people to Jesus.
  • Pray for me to find the time to get Malaumanda lessons done.