Where We Began

Jon and I have separately known about Wycliffe Bible Translators for as long as we can remember.  Each of our parents have partnered with Wycliffe missionaries for decades.  Missions, however, didn't interest us until high school when we each spent three summers with Teen Missions International.  (My noble motives, unfortunately, were to travel and escape my summer job.)

During the summer of 1990, Jon and I met for the first time very briefly, but more importantly we both heard the testimony of Marilyn Lazslo, a Wycliffe Bible Translator in Papua New Guinea.

Marilyn and her team of Papua New Guinean co-translators were traveling around the US, celebrating the completion of the Sepik Iwam New Testament.  Marilyn told how God used her, a simple farm girl from Indiana, to help translate the New Testament into Sepik Iwam.  As a result, God's Word transformed the whole village.  Her story made us want to be involved in something with eternal value.  To what greater cause could we devote our lives, then helping to bring God’s Word to those who didn’t have it in their heart language.  So at the end of that summer, we each committed our lives to full-time missionary service...and especially to Bible translation.

We both ended up attending Bethany College of Missions where we met again and compared life stories.  It didn't take us long to realize that God had prepared us for each other, so we married in December 1995.  Our wedding verse is Colossians 3:17 "And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father." (NLT)  Even today, our purpose in this life is to bring glory to our Father.