Joe and Jerry Snyder
Wycliffe Bible Translators
September 2006

About Jerry
We had a bit of a scare this month. On Tuesday the 19th Jerry called me out of a meeting to her office. When I got there she told me that she had been having severe chest pains all morning and did not feel well at all. She was very frightened and upset but wouldn't let me call an ambulance lest it cause too much disruption for the office so I drove her to the hospital about 30 minutes away. They immediately gave her the blue card and sent her in for an EKG and evaluation. They said there was no indication that she was actually having a heart attack at the moment so they drew some blood for additional tests and sat us in the waiting room. Five hours later, she finally saw a doctor who repeated that nothing showed a heart attack and recommended that she stay overnight for observation. We weren't sure that was warranted but he also said that they would have a cardiologist do some more extensive testing for any heart problem. Rather than go home and start looking for a cardiologist on our own the next day, we opted to have her admitted. The next day they did a nuclear stress test and late that afternoon reported that they did not see any reason that the pain might be coming from her heart. They recommended that she follow up with a gastroenterologist to see whether the pain might be related to acid reflux, an ulcer, or something related. She was released about 6pm.

We don't have any specific objective evidence of it yet but you might speculate that such an incident is not unexpected after 12-18 months of intense stress over her software conversion and installation process. Praise God that the project is nearly complete and that the system is working pretty well. But we need to get her back to a lighter working schedule (like a simple 40 hour week) with some time to relax and get away from it all. We are thankful to God that this hasn't turned out to be anything serious. The other impact to us, of course, is financial. So far, we have had to come up with $600 when she checked out of the hospital. If God leads you to help us defray this unexpected expense, it would be greatly appreciated. Use the address below to send it to Wycliffe. 

Bible Translation Praise
We had a tremendous dedication service at Wycliffe last week for sixteen New Testaments that have been completed with Wycliffe involvement around the world. The Wycliffe Board of Directors was meeting last week so we timed the dedication to allow them to attend. It was a moving experience for all of them. We opened up our auditorium to allow for numerous friends, families, pastors and church leaders, and other visitors who wanted to attend the dedication. Each New Testament is carried in accompanied by the flag of the country and reading of the details of the language group impacted. Four individuals shared stories from their connection to the translation or participation in the translation. The real impact, of course, is changed lives as people are converted to faith in Jesus Christ. The work of one translation project in the Philippines was several hundred churches with several tens of thousands of baptized Christians in them. Many others have resulted in indigenous people learning to read and write and to be able to actually study the Scripture. If you are coming to Orlando for any reason some time, check with us for plans for events such as this that you might witness.

Joe's Update
The Information Technology Department had a very interesting and busy month. We hosted a seminar on the Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture (you can read more about it here if you are really interested in IT issues: http://www.zifa.com/ ). John Zachman is a world-class expert on Enterprise Architecture and a tremendous Christian (an elder at the Church on the Way in Van Nuys, CA pastored by Jack Hayford). So, John, accompanied by Stan Locke from Toronto, came to Orlando and did the seminar for our Wycliffe and SIL staff. We were able to spend some one-on-one time with him in discussing business re-engineering and aligning business processes with IT systems. That was a real privilege and the John/Stan team made a wonderful contribution to the Wycliffe family of organizations. (You IT people can ask more but this is all for the general population of readers here.)

The second exciting thing is that we are getting our project underway to do application development work in India by partnering with a Christian-based company that operates from Chennai to do outsourcing work. One of my strategic objectives for the new fiscal year is to expand our capabilities to turn out new information systems by engaging new resources and placing some of our staff in a site where they can connect contractors in another country to our development teams here. God has brought us together with a Christian who has a company that does this kind of work and even provided funding from a group of Christians who would like to see something like this work. I would define the focus of this project as "accelerating Bible translation through creative IT strategies". If you want to hear more, let me know. In the meantime, pray that this will be successful in a quantum leap forward in the quantity of work that we can get done in IT. God is clearly at work here and we want to work His plan not ours. Some of our staff will be able to not only impact Bible translation through their work but also be involved with what God is doing through churches in that country. One of the early steps in implementing this will by a trip by Joe to India to work out details with the contractor involved. Pray for a safe and successful visit which will probably be the last week of October.

Praise and Prayer requests: