Troy Manning

… but the Lord directeth his steps.”  I marvel at the way the Lord orchestrates my schedule.  I set aside a month to be in Grand Rapids in Jan-Feb so that I could work on things at the office, but the Lord had me set that aside so that I could get into an accident and then recover.  I planned on being down here in SC so that I could visit the various churches in NC and SC, but the Lord knew that I also needed to be at home so that I could enjoy the comforts of home as I transition back into a back-braceless life.  I couldn’t fill two months in the summer (July and August) with deputation meetings, so I decided it would be a good time to prepare for two annual events at BI (staff retreat and consultant seminar) at the end of the summer.  But the Lord kept those months free so that I could also take a trip to Togo.  I just found out this morning that I will be sent to Togo to help with translation consulting.  Apparently, the translators have been working diligently and have 10 books ready for consultation.  I won’t be able to check all of them, but at least I can get some checked.  I look forward to getting back to the continent of Africa. 

In my immediate future (i.e., tomorrow), I will be heading to Tar Heel country.  I have a meeting at Clayton, and I plan on visiting a few other pastors in the area.  My current plan is to return on Friday evening. 

Over the past few days I’ve been working on an interesting project–at least, it’s interesting to me.  I prepared a worksheet that a consultant can go over with a translator as he prepares to translate the book of Ezra.  The worksheet includes a book introduction, a content summary, a list of difficult vocabulary, explanations of difficult passages, and a few other items.  Such a worksheet will give the translator all the information he needs (hopefully!) to make his work easier.  The list of vocabulary items is particularly helpful, because it explains what each Hebrew term means so that the translator can figure out which words to use in his language.  I organized the words according to semantic domain.  For example, Ezra has numerous words for government officials (king, governor, lieutenant, prince, lord, chief, ruler, counselor, judge, magistrate, elder, chancellor, scribe).  These are all in the same semantic domain of “government officials.”  The translator can then take these words and figure out what matches he has in his language.  This will be a difficult task for the translator (since two country’s governments are rarely the same, especially if those governments are separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles), but at least he can wrestle through those issues before he begins translating.  If he did it as he translated, he would need to constantly rethink his decisions as he came across new words that he hadn’t accounted for. 

I haven’t heard whether or not my support increased to 55% last month, but I am trusting in the Lord.  It usually takes a while for the new support to be processed through the BMM system.  Keep praying!