The Car

Thank you so much for praying for the situation with my car!! Right now, we're looking at changing the fuel filter, which could solve the entire problem! Of course, the mechanic found nothing wrong with it when he drove it, but based on what I've told him it's doing, the fuel filter may be the issue. Praise God with me that this is an inexpensive fix!

In North Carolina

Thank you all for your prayers and Elisabeth and I drove here. We were able to stop in Tennessee at her brother's and sleep! Please continue to pray that my car will be able to be fixed, and that it's not the transmission!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Prayer Requests

Hi Friends, Well, my time in the training program at New Tribes in nearly finished, and I will be heading to NC to see my parents. My plans have changed from what I had perfectly laid out. The decision was made this morning to have my transmission worked on here in Missouri rather than pushing it to (hopefully) get to NC.

How have I seen God working this far?

1—A man on staff has offered to take care of my car on this end: getting it into the mechanic and dealing with it while I am gone.

2—I have a ride to NC with a classmate!

3—I have a way back to Missouri, where my car will be.

This all before 8:00 this morning! Praise God with me for going before and laying out His plans. Please pray for me as I have to repack, decide what to keep or get rid of, and work out many of the logistics of my new traveling plans! Thank you so much for your prayers; they mean more to me than I can express in words.

Love, Carrie

The Best White Elephant Gift...

Yes, at the Youth Christmas party, I bequeathed Mr. Wilson to an unsuspecting 9th grader. He (the fish) traveled in a beautifully decorated glass milk jug. He was so well disguised that our beloved youth all wanted to shake the milk jug and drink the innards... luckily, we caught them (most of the time) before too much damage was done!

Six of our guys...yes...six.

Blowing plastic bubbles

I've had a great time with the youth group over the past year and a half--it will be hard to leave them. Tuesday, 18th, will be our last meeting that I will be at.

Bible Translation

Target Audience for our translation: 3 year olds

This week we went through Bible Translation class. It had multiple aspects, as we discussed what was more important to keep in translating: form (word for word translation) versus meaning (communicating the message). It was very good to look at multiple English translations and see that even the most "literal" translations that we have are still not word-for-word from the Greek and Hebrew. It is just not possible, because languages do not always have a word-for-word translation. Just try to explain an idiom to a non-English speaker--it won't happen in the same number of words! And if that non-Englisher speaker tried to explain one of their idioms literally, it would not make sense to us.

One of the other parts of the translation class was to take Mark 2:1-12 "Jesus heals the paralytic". It takes teamwork to create a translation, and we were on teams for the project. We had to choose a target audience, and then translate the scripture into 3 year old acceptable terms. It was more difficult than we anticipated! In the end, we may have ended up with a translation acceptable to a 5 year old, but the goal was accomplished: we learned that translation is not easy!

Prayer Request for the next week:
--Church Planting class begins tomorrow. We will be in teams discussing different aspects of Church Planting from learning the national language (in my case Spanish) to leaving the tribe after a church has been successfully planted.

--I'll be saying goodbye to many friends that I've made over the past few years. Some of them I have gone through all 4 1/2 years of training with, and some have just come to school here this year. Please pray that we would all have a good last week together!

--Please pray that "Black Beauty" my favorite little Saturn will continue working until I get to North Carolina. The transmission has been acting up, and I have a 16 hour drive ahead of me December 20-21.

Thank you for taking this requests with me boldly before the throne of grace!
Love, Carrie

A Few More Okie Pictures:

Pastor DJ being guarded by the Romans (formerly known as Linguistics Students!)

3 VERY FULL carts of groceries for 60 servings of food 3 meals a day for 7 days...

And yes, I did find Muskogee, OK and said,
"Okie from Muskogee."

DONE WITH CHEROKEE!!!

I have finally finished my Cherokee write-up! I am going to begin translation class on Tuesday morning. (I'll write some about that later this week.) Please pray that we as a class will finish the next 2 1/1 weeks strong!


Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. Hebrews 12:1-3