One of the things we’ve been doing as we gear up for Phase 1 teaching is traveling to the different hamlets and whetting their appetites for God’s Word. We want to get to each hamlet in our area (we’ve been to two so far for this) and talk with the people a bit about the teaching to excite them about God’s Word and prepare their hearts for truth.
As part of these hamlet meetings, we take our 6,000-bead timeline with us to show them and talk about. We start the ‘bead’ talk by only showing a strand of 200 beads and talking about what the beads represent. As they come to understand that each bead represents a year in history we shift the talk to moving backward in time and see what they know or can remember from 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and so forth.
Well, before we get even 200 years into the past, their knowledge runs out. They can name their father, and their grandfather, and their great-grandfather and go quite a few generations back (more than I can with my family tree), but when they get as far as they can, then that’s pretty much the point when the world began (for them).
After we show them that about 200 years in the past they no longer know anything that existed then or happened then, we ask if they know the age of the earth. (Do you know how old the ground is? When the sun was born? How about the moon and stars?) This leads to sharing that God knows, and that God has given His Word to man.
We then pull out the 6,000-bead timeline and watch their eyes grow wide in wonder and astonishment as we unroll it. We say, “God has told us what happened at the beginning. God has told us about the middle. And God has told us about the future, all in His Word. And we’re going to share with you God’s Word so you can know it, too.”
Our main goal during this time is to get them thinking and hopefully to come to the conclusion that they don’t know a lot of stuff, or the stuff they do know doesn’t make sense (for example – each clan has a different version of how the world was created and how their ancestors came to be. But they can’t all be right, right??)
We know that we are only working alongside the Holy Spirit as he prepares people’s minds to receive the truth, and we are excited to think that soon our good friends here will have the chance to hear and obey.
Please pray for them in these times when they have a lot of decisions to make: Will they come to the teaching? Will they come to the ENTIRE teaching? Will they believe what they hear? What then? And please pray for us as we continue to do our best in writing lessons and translating the Bible and trying not to misrepresent Christ to this group of people.