The Big Woods family got to know Craig and Shelly while they were part of our church family and training at New Tribes Jersey Shore. They are currently serving in Sentani, Papua Indonesia.  They have three children, Jade, Kale and Hali. Craig is currently involved in building homes among the Kora people, in the tribe of Nggingginem .  There is much work to be done. Pray for wisdom as the men leave their families for extended periods of time to prepare the way to move into the tribe. Pray for strength and health for Craig as he faces danderous conditions for building and for Shelly and the kids while he is away. Ask God to be preparing the hearts of these tribal people for the good news.

craig_schafer@ntm.org  

Craig Schafer

Hello from Nggingginem!! Well just wanted to give you an update from the crazy, fast pace, exciting life of a tribal language learner!! Ok, so maybe that description is not totally true. Ok actually the life of a tribal language learner is mostly opposite to that!! Yes life is going good but language learning is still not always the most exciting or fun! As I sat down to write I thought about all that has happened in the last month and mostly this is what has been going through my head, language study, language study, language study!!! So yeah not a whole lot of wild crazy stuff going on but actually that is very beneficial to language study!! Both Shelly and I have been pressing on to get to our goals for when our language consultants come in, in two weeks from now!! That is right, we have our first of 4 official language checks coming up the first week of September!! We feel ready for it (kind of!!) and are excited to be able to get some direction from our consultants on where to go next in order to progress further in our language abilities. Please be praying for us though that the check will go well and we will be at the level we are supposed to be at!!

On the family scene things are going well. I really should have Shelly write about the kids and all that sometime as she does so much of a better job than I do, but yeah they are doing good!! They are still making the adjustments to life with friends that you can’t speak to, so that is sometimes hard. I think it can be most frustrating for kale as a lot of times he just resorts to yelling and screaming at them if they do something he does not like!! But really for the most part they are doing good and even picking up a little of the language. Over the last week or so we have all gone through a little bit of sickness but now are on the mend so that is nice. Please keep praying for good health for us as it is always hard to get language study in when you have a sick family.

In regards to language and checks and getting to the point where we can present the gospel and all, I would just like to tell you about a conversation I had with a good friend of mine Yoel today. About two weeks ago him and some other guys where kind of still trying to understand why exactly we are here (we have told them about a 1000 times but it is still hard for them to understand) I was explaining to them that we have some really big news to tell them. ( just to explain, news (wene) in here is really big stuff. I mean even if it is small they love hearing it and they get really excited about it. All you have to do is say wene (news) and they become all ears!!) So anyway I had learned how to say we had really big news, and so this time I explained it like that. I told them that the only reason we left our families and friends in America was that we had some Wene ngok (big news) that we needed to tell them. Obviously they were all ears and they wanted to hear it right then, but I had to explain that there was no way I could explain it good enough since I did not know their language and neither of us speaks the national language well enough. So anyway they were all excited and after that everything died down and we went back to talking about normal stuff. Well anyway, today I was talking with Yoel again and after a bit when most of the other guys that had been with us left he got all serious and said to me, “man, I cannot stop thinking about the big news you guys have to tell us someday. I try to forget about it because it is a long ways away but I am just really excited about it!!” He went on to tell me that I really need to get out and study even more!! He said that I need to come to his house to study morning, afternoon and all night!! He was obviously pretty pumped about it!! As we were talking about it some other guys came in and it was all excitement once again, with them trying to figure out what this could be about. At one point I heard Yoel trying to explain just how big this news was to them (from what I had told him) and he told them this. “This news is really really big, it is bigger than anything we are talking about right now. It is bigger than the airstrip news or anything with the government making our area a new district (this is HUGE stuff to them right now!!) This news is way bigger than that!!” So anyway it is cool to see that God is working in these guys hearts right now, getting them excited about what we have to say one day. The only problem is that we have a little thing called language learning still in between now and then!! So in regards to that please be praying. I believe that God is preparing hearts of people like Yoel to be ready to hear the word and now we just have to get to the point where we can introduce them to the biggest WENE (NEWS) they have ever heard!! Thank you all so much for your prayers.

For the Sake of the Wene Ngok

(Big News)

The Schafers