Here it is, again. Time to produce a missionary newsletter. Actually, it is more properly called a prayer letter, because we want you to pray for us when you get it. Prayer letters are great things, because they help keep us connected with our partners, serve as reminders that we are still doing the work of the Lord that He has called us and our partners to do. I say us and our partners, of course, because there is no way we can do all of this ourselves. One, we couldn’t afford it, financially. Two, we probably could not stand the heat of the spiritual battle without prayer backup. We were, in fact, partially self-supporting when we first started in full-time Christian ministry, but once our savings were depleted in about 2001, that stopped being the case. Now, we have just the Lord to rely on for our physical needs. Fortunately, He is faithful, and He has called some wonderful friends to partner with us and keep us going. Praise the Lord!

Now, what do I write about in our prayer letter? Lori and I have, since the beginning of our missionary journey in 2000, tried to keep our official prayer letters under 2 pages. We figure that one 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper, written on both sides, using pictures liberally, and without resorting to itty-bitty type, is about the attention span of most of the busy people we send these to. That may or may not be true. We get, and read, longer newsletters, but it is also true that the really long ones tend to pile up somewhere to be read later. They may or may not actually get fully read, even if they are from dear friends. The space limit forces us to focus. It is hard, though. So much is going on in our lives and our ministry that it is hard to condense it all. In this journal, I allow myself the luxury of rambling on longer with no set space limit, but I also know that much fewer people will read it. That is OK. I feel better sometimes for having written it.

If you were to ask Rachel what our biggest news is, lately, she would probably tell you that we now have a kitten. His name is Puma. Rachel named him. Mostly, she calls him “kitty.” Rodents beware! This animal will be a mighty hunter in our house.

We were asked by one church to provide them with a 1-2 minute video presentation that they could use to promote missions during a Sunday service. Many of my friends asked me what we could do to condense our lives serving the Lord here down to two minutes or less. Good question. I tried, anyway. The result of my effort in that respect is posted at http://kahunapule.org/kmpj2008-03-24.mpg for your viewing pleasure. It is a huge (109,199,360 bytes) file, so great patience is required in downloading it, but I wanted to keep it high enough resolution that it would look good projected on a screen in front of a church. I even put the slide show in a format you can create a video DVD from, if you are familiar with zip files, ISO images, and burning DVDs. That file is huge (86,037,612 bytes), too. Fortunately, I managed to upload these files just before the rates went up for Internet usage, here. Internet access in Ukarumpa is outrageously expensive. It is actually about $9000/month for the satellite connection, which gives us about 200 kbps download capacity. We share the bandwidth and the cost among 262 users. Instead of just dividing the monthly cost per user evenly, which would result in a charge of about $34.35/month, the SIL PNG Branch powers that be have decided to divide the cost proportional to usage in megabytes. It used to be, up through March, that the only bytes metered for billing were HTTP downloads on ports 80 and 443 (regular and secure web browsing). Those bytes were charged at $0.25 per megabyte. Starting in April, all FTP and HTTP uploads and downloads are now billed at $0.225 per megabyte. That means that it would have cost me $43.92 to upload those two files to our web site. I probably would not have done that. Our budget is too tight. This billing scheme obviously keeps our usage down and our bills high– especially at a time when we are doing college search work for Ben and trying to find bargain air fares for Nate and Ben. I hope you enjoy the show, and can download it for free (even if it takes a while).

Speaking of money, someone asked how we were doing financially. Since we computed our fundraising requirements for living here, the U. S. dollar has dropped 11.8% against the PNG kina. Our support has dropped by 2.6%. We have had some unexpected extra expenses and price increases. Our savings are depleted. And it will cost about $4760 to get Nate here and back for a visit/mission trip, and Ben back to the USA for college, just in air fare alone, not counting stuff like food and lodging on the way. Then there is the matter of college tuition at the Christian college Ben has chosen to attend. In other words, if the Lord moves on you to help with any of this, please do. If not, you can still pray for our needs to be met. Don’t worry, though. God is faithful, and will not let us down.

One thing I always want to know when I support missionaries is what they are actually doing, and if they are still doing it. I still have my 40-hour-per-week job at SIL PNG Branch Aviation, doing computer support work, plus various other “side” ministries, like leading Bible studies, working on the World English Bible, etc. Lori still has her teaching and HIV/AIDS task force chair jobs, and still takes care of our children. Household tasks always seem to take longer, here. Stuff like having no automatic dishwasher (and not being able to afford one at the outrageous prices they cost, here) make a difference. There is no ordering out for pizza or anything like that. We do eat pizza, but it is a lot of work to make them. Naturally, Rachel keeps us busy, as you would expect from an active 3-year-old. The adoption paperwork saga continues. How long do you think it should take for the Social Services office in Port Moresby to fax a copy of a letter of consent to finalize the adoption to us? An hour? A day? A month? They got it in January, and it is now May, and I’m still waiting, and still calling periodically and getting new excuses. A friend of mine, also working on an adoption, spent a week in Port Moresby, in person, trying to get some papers moved about one block. It did finally work. Rachel, however, is still blissfully unaware of her precarious legal status. She knows that beyond the shadow of a doubt, she has a mommy, a daddy, and three big brothers that really love her. She knows that her name is Rachel Brianna Joy Johnson. We will keep at it until we get the required court decree to make that her legal status as well, opening the door to get her USA citizenship.

Also on the subject of waiting for the PNG government, all of our resident visas expired on the 31st of January. The PNG government has had our passports and visa renewal applications since December 2007, and still hasn’t finished processing them. Apparently, it is OK for us to stay here as long as the government is working on them, but if we try to leave without a valid visa, it is a crime. This has caused excessive stress to many people in this community. Of course, if the government should deny any of our visa applications, we would have to leave immediately. That would also be stressful, of course. I don’t think that will happen, but please pray that Ben’s visa gets processed by June and the rest of ours by November, at the latest.

Lori would like to go to a teacher’s conference in Hong Kong in November. That requires a visa. That also will require money for air fare, etc. Professional development for teachers is still important, here, but not very available in PNG.

We certainly have challenges, here, and I haven’t listed them all. I don’t intend to. Instead, I want to focus on some progress. I just started leading an inductive Bible Study for the current Translators’ Training Course. This is for about 49 people from 15 language groups. It is a joy to see how they pick up the Bible study techniques, and want to go back to their villages and show others how to do it. I got a little choked up, though, listening to one man lamenting how his grandparents didn’t know any of this. You see, the Gospel didn’t get to his village until after they had died. What can I say? We are working to fulfill the Great Commission, but I don’t think all of us fully realize how urgent the task is. At least the Gospel is going out to his village, now, and he is working on a Bible translation for his own language.

Translating a New Testament is a long task. It can take years, often decades. This year, the task finished for the Kube language in March, with a Bible dedication for those people. More dedications are coming up in June and August. Praise God!

Now, for my next trick, I’ll condense this to a few bullets, add some pictures and an article Lori wrote, and produce a proper prayer letter. It will lack many details, but it will probably be read by more people than this article.

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!

The best place in the world to be is where God wants us to be, when He wants us to be there.
In 2007,

• We moved twice (once within Colorado, once back to Papua New Guinea).
• Lori renewed her teacher’s certificate.
• I continued Bible translation software development while in Colorado.
• Upon return to Papua New Guinea, Lori returned to teaching, and I started a new job doing custom database programming for the SIL PNG Aviation Department.
• Two of Rachel’s post-placement home study reports were mailed to oblivion while we were in the USA, and never received by the Social Services office in Port Moresby. There were no backup copies anywhere. It took us being physically present in Papua New Guinea to recover from that mess. The process still has a long way to go, but at least the paperwork is moving, now.
• We distributed about 1,000 fix-tuned radios that are permanently tuned to Wantok Radio Light.
• I repaired the Wantok Radio Light station in Kainantu twice.
• I have been leading a Bible study for 10th grade boys.

In 2008, our plans and goals are to:

• Continue with our present jobs (teaching and Aviation Department Computer support).
• Continue helping with Christian radio ministry as practical.
• Continue leading a Bible study for Evan’s class.
• Have a family vacation, including Nate.
• Get Ben enrolled in college in the USA.
• Complete Rachel’s legal adoption.
• Attempt to participate in some Bible translation software global open source programming projects.

Long-term missions have long-lasting benefits. We don’t plan to retire before Jesus comes back, as long as we are able to keep serving Him on Earth.

Alas, I just lost over a hundred photos and a camera, all in one loud “pop!” My Sony DSC-S600 camera, the one that I used to take the Asaro Mud Man photo, here, self-destructed. I had just shot a picture of a yellow-lapped honeyeater dining on hibiscus nectar, turned the camera off, and set it on the table next to me. Suddenly, it made a loud popping noise as the camera destroyed itself and the 4 GB memory card that was in it, without any apparent provocation. Sigh. That was annoying. Also lost were some really neat pictures I took on a recent trip to Goroka and back.

If that wasn’t enough, the same day, I found out that my old dog, Mandy, was so old and sick that my sister took her to the vet to be put down in the USA. And today, the first day of 2008, my elderly dog, Dallas, seems to be so sick that after several days of not eating, she just wants to lay down in a ditch and die. I didn’t know what to do, so I asked God to take care of it. He did.

You know, even when trouble comes, and it does that a lot on planet Earth, God is good. His mercy and loving kindness last forever. Keep smiling. Jesus has overcome the world. The glory of His reward far outshines the annoyances along the way. Blessed be the Name of the Lord!

The year just rolled over to 2008. What do I see? I see a more intense year in the battle between God’s light and dark enemies. Battles rage, and many people are so distracted that they don’t even see the conflict.

Have you noticed the drop in missions funding, and the trend away from long term (career) missions to short-term missions? There is, of course, a place for both long-term and short-term missions, and the important thing is to make sure you go the way the Lord leads. Don’t substitute one for the other when God calls you– do what He says if you want to be fruitful. I am concerned that more people are being called to long term missions than are going, however. You see, there are things you can do long term that are impossible short term. You can truly learn new languages and cultures and understand what it takes to truly impact people and cultures with the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a way that sticks and bears fruit far beyond what you see initially. Take a moment and ask yourself if you are one of those people called to go into a career as a Christian missionary. You can have all kinds of vocations within such a career– pastor, evangelist, administrator, aircraft mechanic, pilot, motorcycle mechanic, rocket scientist, custodian, doctor, nurse, teacher… whatever it takes to get the Word of God to people. There are also a lot of different organizations and movements that need help. Do some research, and listen to the Lord.

Is there a cost to long term missions. Yes. It costs you your life, really. You end up losing your life to gain it back again. The Lord may lead you outside of your comfort zone. OK, I’m pretty sure He does that for everyone who follows Him, at least once. There are dangers to going into another place and culture, but safety can’t be guaranteed anywhere this side of Heaven, really. When we get to Heaven, I plan to have lots of friends there worshiping the Father with us– friends I helped find the way there: Jesus Christ.

Think about it.

Ben’s auto mechanics project in the picture isn’t exactly what I’m talking about, although I’m thankful for that. Ben is making good progress on it, and it should soon be able to pass a safety inspection and be street legal.

What we really need is a reliable, rugged, 4-wheel-drive vehicle that we can drive along the Highlands Highway and lesser roads without fear of breakdown or getting stuck. Cars and trucks cost a lot in Papua New Guinea, because none are made here, there is a high import duty, and transportation charges are high. Nevertheless, I believe that the Lord will provide both an affordable vehicle and the money to buy it debt-free. If He puts it on your heart to help us with this need, please do.

In a land where only about 10% of the people have electrical power in their houses, you might wonder what good such technology as electronics, satellites, radio, and cell phones might be. Actually, such technology is very useful, indeed. Technology is no substitute for living and proclaiming the Word of God. It can, however, make it easier to reach people with the Word of God and make the logistics of getting the Word of God to new people groups much easier.

We rely heavily on communication satellites. All of our telephone calls from Ukarumpa to anywhere farther than Kainantu are carried by satellite, no matter which way we make them. The Papua New Guinea Christian Broadcasting Network (also known as Wantok Radio Light) uses a satellite channel to distribute its programming to FM radio stations scattered all over the country. Our Internet connection is via satellite. In a country consisting of about 600 islands, including the very large and mountainous island of New Guinea, satellite links are the most practical way to communicate in many cases. Running cables all over the place is way too expensive, and far to vulnerable to damage by vandals, earthquakes, and other problems. We also make heavy use of HF and UHF radio links.

A few weeks ago, the local Wantok Radio Light station in Kainantu stopped working. Its receiver (shown in the picture) apparently suffered damage to its RF front end in a lightning storm. The station manager sent a replacement up via an SIL flight, and I put the new one in place. Many people were happy to be able to hear their favorite Christian programming, again.

Although few people have electrical power in their houses in Papua New Guinea, there are many battery-operated radios listening in. We have distributed about 700 fix-tuned, solar powered radios to people in Wantok Radio Light’s service area, so far.

Yes, the Good News of Jesus Christ is simple enough for a child to believe. Rocket science can help deliver that good news.

A helicopter is a wonderful but expensive machine. With it, we save lives. We do that by moving Bible translators into places they can’t get with fixed wing aircraft or wheeled vehicles to bring the Word of God to people so that they can be saved. Eternal life is the greatest gift we can get from God. God, in His great wisdom, has tasked us, His children, with sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ with people so that they can believe in Him and gain eternal life with Him.

Of course, we also save lives with this machine in the more common sense, too. SIL Aviation recently made national news by saving the life of a pregnant mother in distress. It is good to show Jesus’ compassion in practical ways. See http://www.thenational.com.pg/100207/nation12.htm for that article.

So, how do we pay for this expensive machine? With a combination of donations and commercial work done with that machine in between Bible translation and life-saving runs.

Another missionary working in Papua New Guinea (and currently on another island) told my wife that they only got a newsletter out about once or twice a year. It is hard, and they just can’t “whip one out like [Michael] does.” I have a confession. I don’t just “whip out” a newsletter. OK, maybe a quick photo of the week email with no major content is pretty quick, but the “official” newsletter that we archive on our web site, email to our partners, and have printed and mailed to our email-less partners takes about two days of labor to produce. It would take less time if we made it longer, actually. We know that people are busy, so we endeavor to keep the newsletters short; no more than one sheet of 8.5 x 11 inch paper, printed on both sides, using type that most people won’t need a magnifying glass to read. In addition, we know that people like pictures. We like them, too. Pictures aren’t just fun to take, they are also effective tools to communicate a lot in a little time. Pictures tell stories. Of course, pictures bring to mind stories, too— usually more stories than I tell. Actually, one of the best things about our web site is that it gives me a place to put the overflow from stuff that didn’t make it into the newsletters. It also is a nice place to be able to post pictures without a really small size limit on the captions. Of course, I realize that not nearly as many people will read all that I post or enjoy the pictures as read our newsletters, but that is OK.

The richness of the full-color range of experiences and adventures with God here and in our travels just flat-out won’t fit in two pages every month or three. There are many significant things going on, times where God has gotten glory by protecting and healing His people, trials and victories over trials great and small, all mixed in with cross-cultural salsa and sprinkled with miracles. Sometimes it seems like a real struggle just to not lose heart, and other times, the joy of the Lord just overwhelms a guy. Through it all, God is faithful. Of course, adventures with God don’t require crossing large quantities of salt water. People struggle to grow close to the Lord in the busy USA, too. So, we keep trying to condense significant events, prayer requests, vision, thanks, and news of what we are doing into less than a page a month. Why do we even bother? Accountability. Reminders for both senders and sent of their dependence on each other. Reminders to pray. That makes it worth it.

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with making the newsletters a little “deeper,” at least for some people. By embedding hyperlinks in our newsletters, I make a way for people who are reading the electronic version online to dig a little deeper or see a little clearer picture with a simple click. At least that works for people who are on the Internet at the time. If they aren’t, or if they are looking at a printed copy, then they still get a decent newsletter.

I’ve also used prayer letter writing as a learning experience. I suppose that a normal person would figure out one software program for creating prayer letters and stick with it. I’ve used a wide variety of programs, sometimes just to learn to use that program. The most recent newsletter I produced was the first one that I produced with Scribus running under Ubuntu Linux. I like it. I think I’ll keep using Scribus for our newsletters for a while. It makes a really good PDF file for our purposes.

I haven’t written much, here. I’ve been pretty busy with life, in general. There is so much that I want to do, and there seems to be so little time to do it. It takes some time to adjust to such a different place and culture, even though we have been here before. Not only is it different than where we were in the USA, it is different in that many things have changed since I was here, last, and I’m doing a different job, here.

As I write this, I hear a flying fox outside. It seems to like the fruit on one of the trees by the front of our house. Fortunately, it is leaving our bananas and oranges alone. Flying foxes, bats with 4-foot wingspans, are interesting animals with a distinctive flapping sound to their flight. I still haven’t gotten a very good picture of a flying fox at night, although I’m thinking that a flash camera trap aimed at that fruit tree would work… but that sounds like too much expense and trouble to go through for a picture, right now.

Since arriving in PNG, I have felt four noticeable earthquakes, none severe enough to do any damage or wake up any teenagers trying to sleep in.

Last weekend, I worked on writing a newsletter. This time, I tried something different. I wrote it using Scribus instead of Adobe InDesign. I was very pleased with how well it worked, and how little time it took me to learn how to use it. Scribus is no where near a sophisticated as Adobe InDesign, but it is also nowhere near as expensive. Scribus is free and open source software. Adobe InDesign has a price that I never would have paid just to get software to do newsletters with. (I had a copy for use in Scripture typesetting applications.) Scribus has a very simplistic story editor that serves to emphasize the fact that you should author any nontrivial length of text in OpenOffice Writer, not Scribus. Actually, you can write a decent newsletter, complete with pictures, in OpenOffice Writer (also free software). However, the layout options and precision of picture placement and much richer in Scribus than OpenOffice Writer. I was also pleased with the PDF creation options built into Scribus. OpenOffice Writer can create PDF files, as well, but it doesn’t have an option for picture downsampling and recompression like Scribus does. Being able to tweak those things really helps when trying to find the best trade-off between high picture quality and small file size. Besides, it just plain feels good to be using free/libre open source software. Some activities are just too important to be locked into expensive proprietary software.

So, why would I post a picture of a truck carrying more than a truckload of people? Maybe you’ll be inspired to agree with us in prayer for the Lord to supply a good, reliable 4WD vehicle for us to use while we are in Papua New Guinea. The road in the photo is paved, but many roads are not paved around here, and some are often impassable without 4 wheel drive.

I told you this was a posting of random thoughts, didn’t I.