By Jill Sanders
Friday, I finally got to go to the people group I’ve been praying for for the past six years! I didn’t exactly know it was them, but I prayed for the people to which God would one day send me. I finally got to meet them.
As we got out of the helicopter, these people were everywhere just waiting to see us and shake our hands. I think the whole village came. But who wouldn’t come see a helicopter and white men?
It all seemed very natural to me. I kept thinking, "This is where I'm supposed to be!"
Our guys – BJ, Jack, and Jeremy, have done a lot of the work before us. They’ve walked the whole people group; they’ve stayed in every village, and they've led us to this village where we will live. Today, we had a big meeting where we signed our land agreement and told them again why we were coming!
1) Learn their language and culture
2) Teach them to read in their own language
3) Translate the Bible into their own language
4) Teach them the Bible from Genesis to Revelation
5) Teach them to take the Gospel to the rest of the language and the to ends of the earth!
Next, tribal believers from two different surrounding languages came and supported our talk. They told the Wantakians that missionaries came into their villages and gave them God’s Talk in their heart language, and they shared about the impact it’s had on their lives. They told the people that they needed to help us learn their language, so we can do the same.
Hearing these believers talk was my favorite part of the whole trip! We heard talk after of the Wantakians saying, “If they would hike all the way over here to tell us this, this talk must be true!”
Wow!
After this, we read our land agreement to the people and the village marked two of the “big men” to sign it. Our men signed it too. We thanked the Wantakians for giving our families land for our houses. It could not have gone better!
As I look back at these short 24 hours that I spent in Wantakia, I am totally amazed at how the Lord desires these people to come to Him!