The Lembena People

I want you to imagine that someone starts to tell you a story: they tell you that this story is the most important story you will ever hear, but after starting to tell the story, they stop. They leave and never come back. You never get to hear the full story. You hear bits and pieces of it in other languages but what you hear doesn’t make sense to you. You can’t really understand what is being said because it’s not in your language. For over 20 years you wait, never hearing the rest of the story. Never hearing it told clearly in your language and even now you wait still. That’s the story of the Lembena People. Around 30 years ago SIL sent a missionary into Lembena who began to learn their language and translate the Word of God, but after several years working with the people and translating portions of the New Testament, he was forced to leave. Since that time the people of Lembena have waited. They have been asking and pleading for missionaries to come finish what was started but there was always a people group more “needy” than them; a language group who hadn’t had an SIL missionary even for a short time, so they were overlooked. Surveys were done among them but no missionaries ever came. Time and time again, this happened. At one point the people of Lembena told New Tribes Mission to stop doing surveys among them. It was too hard for them to have missionaries come, look around for a few days, leave and never come back. They told New Tribes to just send them a missionary who would stay, learn their language and finish telling them this story. That was seven years ago.

On October 9th, Adam, Jason and I (Micah) spent a week among the Lembena people. We were treated like kings even though it was their “time of hunger”, when they don’t have a lot of food. We told them what we would do if we came; that we would live among them and learn their language, we would teach them to read and write in their own language, then we would tell them the story of God’s Word in their language so they could understand it and then we would translate the Bible so they could read it for themselves. Every village we went to and every village leader we talked to said the same thing. “Yes! We want this and we need this. Please come.” They showed us places where we could build our houses and live among them. They showed us trees we could cut down and use to build our houses. They even told us that if we wanted to build our houses on a piece of land where they had already built, that they would tear down their house so we could live there! At the end of our trip, one of the village leaders invited us to his house where he had killed a pig and slow cooked it all day for us to honor us. We left that trip with our hearts breaking for these people. They need the Gospel. After taking a few days to process the survey and ask the Lord for direction and wisdom, our team unanimously agreed that this is where the Lord is leading us to serve!

Upcoming Plans and Prayer Requests

• We only have two and a half weeks left of orientation here in Madang! Our time has flown by! Please pray for us as we say goodbye to our friends in the community that we may never see again and for us to finish strong here.
• Praise: Micah taught his first sermon in Tok Pisin last night! So amazing to see how far we have come in language! Praise God!
• After we finish here in Madang we will have a 2 week orientation trip to NTM support center in Goroka. Please pray that this trip goes well!
• After our time in Goroka, we will be flying to the Islands of PNG where we will be spending Christmas at Hoskins Center and then heading to the Tigak Language for Bush orientation! Pray that this will be a time of learning for us from experienced missionaries and an awesome national church!
• Please remember to be praying for the Adam and Jason who are still in Lembena milling lumber for our houses and will most likely spend the next few months in and out of Lembena doing build trips.