Prayer Letter Archive

January 13, 2005

Dear Praying friends,

"TSUNAMI HITS INDONESIA!"

This has been making the headlines all over the US these past couple of weeks. Our hearts go out to the many thousands of Indonesian and Asian people who were affected by this. We do appreciate your prayers for the Indonesian people and the massive relief effort which is underway. We did want you to know that none of our NTM personnel nor tribal works were affected. This earthquake took place in the Western seas of Indonesia so the island of Sumatra protected the rest of Indonesia from being hit by the huge wave.

TEACHING AT OUR LANGUAGE INSTITUTE

We taught in Camdenton, Missouri last month, and it went really well. Three of us missionaries with tribal experience taught a Church Planting Module to our students in training. I was privileged to be able to lead a class students mainly headed to Indonesia so it was fun to interact with them and set up scenarios they would likely encounter on the field. After this course was finished we attended a three day safety seminar which was also held there at our Language Institute.

CHRISTMAS

Christmas was just around the corner after arriving home from Camdenton. We had a wonderful Christmas being able to spend it with Geoff and Tina down in Sanford, Florida. They were spending Christmas with Tina's family and were very gracious to invite us down to an already overflowing house full of people to join them for this time. We will tresure these memories for years to come. Geoff and Tina are doing real well and looking forward to moving into their tribal village and studying the Quechua language and culture.

TRIP TO INDONESIA

This has been the headlines around our house since being back from Florida as we will be making another trip back next month. We have been busy making bookings with the airlines and also working on obtaining a visa. We are scheduled to leave on February 18 which is just 5 weeks away! This trip looks to be a very busy trip so we will appreciate your prayers. Our goals for this trip will be threefold. The first thing we will be doing is a final check on the translation of the book of Luke. We are expecting this to take about 12 days of intense work with our tribal language helpers. From there Steve and I will be attending Church Planting Consultant meetings in Jakarta in preparation for doing consultant work on our island of Sulawesi. We will then be traveling into our Wana tribe to meet with our believers for teaching and encouragement. Next we plan to take some of our tribal church leaders into some of the other mission stations to start evaluating what the needs are in our various tribal works on the island. As we do consultant work we want to include our tribal believers in the process so this can become a part of their lives and to see intertribal fellowship and encouragement established amongst our tribal churches on our island. We will appreciate your prayers for the finances of all this travel. The international portion of our tickets will come to $3000 and then we will also have domestic air travel coupled with helicopter trips to the various tribal areas.

THANK YOU!

We want you to know that your part on our team is very much appreciated and we want to thank you so much for your prayers this past month. It is a privilege working together with you and it has been great to see what God has been doing in Indonesia and how He has been building his church there.

Thanks for being a part,

Ed & Jeanne Casteel