“I hope it’s all right that we did this.” Rahim held up a notebook full of handwritten pages. “I know you hired us to translate some story books into our language, and we’ve done that. But in our free time we wanted to translate the Bible.”

Rahim lives in a refugee camp in East Africa. Through your generosity, he and a few other refugees have been working to give their people the gift of literacy. But their real passion is to have God’s Word in their own language.

Rahim and three of his teammates fasted and prayed. Ultimately they concluded, “Yes, God wants us to translate the Bible.”

They didn’t let their lack of computers, formal training, and basic resources stop them. They obtained a copy of the Gospel of Matthew in another language and began translating. They had already drafted 14 chapters, hand writing each verse in their notebook, by the time they were able to show it to a missionary.

You are giving Rahim and his teammates the tools they need to bring God’s Word to their people.

Rahim and his team are now entering their drafts into a laptop computer that you provided instead of hand writing them. This gives them access to tools for sharpening their translation and preparing it for publication.

The team’s enthusiasm for translating Scripture is coupled with careful thought. When they translated Jesus’ words in Matthew 6 about storing up treasure in heaven, they knew that “rust” had little if any meaning to their people. Eventually they chose the word for another treasure destroyer: a small wood-eating worm.

Thank you for giving Rahim’s people what neither rust nor wood-eating worms can ever take away from them — the eternal Word of God!