Hi all, thanks for your comments and e-mails, all your support is very much appreciated. It really helps to have you all praying and writing.
Work at Wycliffe is coming along well - as ever it’s hard to show you any progress, but every day we are closer to a new piece of working translation software. Recently, I have been working on allowing users to type using complex input methods. This means that we will soon be able to get text from languages like Thai into the program, where the specialised Wycliffe software can do it’s stuff in accurately displaying the characters.
On a completely unrelated subject, I’d like to share an expedition from a couple of weeks ago.
Occasionally, Shanon and her family go out to help the homeless people living on the streets of Calgary. They went out a couple of weeks ago, and I joined them.
We made many lunches, and headed off into town. There several areas of downtown where there are many people in need, we only went to one. We hadn’t been all the way through that area when what had seemed like a huge stash of food had been finished.
We had many mixed reactions, from deep suspicion - to deep gratefulness. What I was not expecting was to hear thing like “Jesus loves you!”, and “If it wasn’t for God, I’d would have been dead long before now.”. Although some of these were offhand remarks, there were definitely one or two there with genuine belief - even in what seems like a hopeless situation.
For me, what remains is the knowledge that, while the occasional lunch run is good, there is an immense need for much more to be done. Not only that, but it is my responsibility (along with everyone who belongs to God) to do something about it.
