The tung oil project has begun, and, ready or not, the nuts are beginning to flow in, and we are collecting.

 

As I write the Dong Christian doing thetung oil project has already begun the collection process. He has found a couple of friends to help him collect, and they will buy direct from villages with which they have contacts to insure that we are the sole buyer for those villages. This insures we receive the nuts even when other businesses roll into town and want to buy ... and they already have.

Many Dong men end up leaving their village and family for a year or two (or more in some cases) to find manual-labor jobs in the big cities to send money back home. Considering there are few Dong Christians, having them leave the Dong areas to find a job does not help the spread of the gospel here. Therefore, the tung project allows my colleague to earn a good amount in a relatively short period of time, thus allowing him to support his family and spend more of the down months on the Lord’s work.

This avoids the messy issue of indigenous church dependency on foreign aid by providing a legitimate source of income that does not take up all their time.

Other believers from his village have crossed to another province just because they were too well-known for their “Christian activities” and watched closely in their home county. Because this is a legitimate business platform, my colleague will be able to more easily travel in the areas other believers could not without drawing suspicion.

• pray for my colleague this next month and a half. He will have access to areas that would otherwise draw suspicion, and we need to pray ahead of him for God to open doors to communicate the good news of Christ, from the mouth of Dong to the ears of Dong. “And now, O Lord, hear their threats, and give your servants great boldness in their preaching” (Acts 4:29)
• Let us pray that the Lord will use this opportunity to start a new Dong church, a small body of believers in a village relatively near to the existing church.
   

The 40 Stories project has been stalled for quite some time partly because we need a few weeks of access to a particular Dong dialect in order to check the biblical accuracy of the recordings with people not otherwise involved with the stories.

 

Conveniently, the stories are recorded in the same Dong dialect spoken in the areas where my colleague is collecting tung nuts! So, because of the tung project, I have the perfect opportunity to travel in the exact areas necessary to check the accuracy of the stories.

As of right now, half of the stories are recorded and none checked. My hope is that I will be able to complete some useful checking on the existing stories, fix those that need fixing, record the remainder of the 40 Stories, and check those as well.

• pray that recording and checking can be completed for all the 40 Stories by the end of this year. Let us pray specifically for this request, and expect God to answer our prayers! You will know what God has done by the next newsletter.