Heavenly realities motivate faithful service
Linda Krieg said her good-byes to her beloved Siawi people last week. The evening before she left, the Siawi church organized a “big send-off meal, with wild pig, greens from the jungle cooked in coconut milk and rice.”
After the fellowship meal, one of the elders stood and said, “Don’t mourn tomorrow when Linda leaves. God sent the missionaries so that we could have life.”
Indeed, Linda’s 26 years of ministering God’s Word to the Siawi people have been used by God to open many hearts to receive the gift of eternal life.
Linda says that later on the Siawi elder announced, “Just like the churches used to help the apostle Paul as they sent him on his way, we wanted to help you, Linda. We have taken up an offering … to help you as you go back to the USA.”
Linda was touched by the sacrificial gifts of the Siawi church. It wasn’t easy to say good-bye to so many dear friends or to close the door on decades of life and ministry among the Siawi people.
Linda says her full sense of the sadness has been dampened by extreme weariness. Linda spent the days leading up to the send-off in the finishing stages of a painstaking translation routine that has grown very familiar.
She shared a brief update from a place at some distance from her long-time Siawi home, a place where she had been accompanied by three Siawi language co-workers.
The goal was to finish the last check on the book of Matthew – the last book to be checked to complete the Siawi New Testament and to complete the read-through of the last few books (James, 1 John, Revelation and Genesis), checking for grammar and spelling errors.
Linda originally had the ambitious goal of their group reading and checking 800 verses a day. At that rate, she says, the checking would have been completed several weeks ago. But, she wrote, there’s a Siawi term for her 800-verse-a-day goal: “Tetame tamo. It means ‘I was dreaming.’”
In the midst of the checking, “I’ve not really been able to think about leaving,” Linda writes. “We are still working.” And yet, this final devotion to the task is deeply rewarding, too.
“It is so good,” Linda declares, “reading through and just soaking in the whole flow of wisdom from God’s Word.”
Packing up for a flight back to the USA isn’t easy. It means weighing things, trying to evaluate how essential each of her possessions really is.
Even after her departure, Linda says that her task is not finished. The careful work on the Siawi New Testament will go on after her move. She has plans to continue work to prepare the Siawi New Testament for publishing. Following that, Linda will revise and edit Siawi literacy materials, incorporating some new ideas.
And eventually, when the Siawi New Testament is finally published and reaches the shores of Papua New Guinea, “the Lord willing, I will fly back to join the Siawis in praising and thanking the Lord for the provision of His Word in their own language.”
As she left, one of her Siawi friends said to her, “Now we will live very far apart, on opposite sides of the world. But later, we will all live close-by so we can see each other and visit all the time.”