NTM - New Tribes Mission | Planting Tribal Churches

Last week while most of you were:

Eating turkey, Christmas shopping, and putting up the tree…

Some of our friends in Pal had a different sort of week:

Someone died (awhile back).

The death was blamed on sorcery.

The alleged sorcerers paid the authorities to come and punish their accusers.

The authorities got some payment.

Everyone went on with planting their yams.

We have some good news of answered prayer to share. I (Kim) found out that I had been suffering from a massive amoeba infection, which had a lot to do with how I was feeling and why I had been so run down. Now that is gone, and I am feeling great. We are working on language study and excited to get back to Pal.

We are not at home in the bush at the moment, but I cannot eat Thanksgiving dinner without a Christmas tree up. So I made one out of twist ties and palm leaves.

TB or not TB…that was the question that brought us out of the bush.

The answer was that I (Kim) do not have TB.

In the past 6 weeks I have had the stomach flu, then pneumonia, then malaria, then pneumonia again and then a sinus infection. (There were 2-3 head colds in there too). The mission Dr. wanted us to come out and just make sure something more serious wasn’t going on, as I had symptoms that made him suspect tuberculosis. I had also spent a lot of time with a friend who died of TB last summer. We were thrilled when tests all came back good.

We kept up language learning and life in the tribe through most of the sickness, but are thankful for this unexpected time out in town to recover fully. A little rest and we should be back to normal soon.

We plan to head back in Dec 12th just in time for our first language evaluation (someone comes in and checks our level of fluency). We brought out hundreds of recordings and hope to keep up some language study while we are out. Meanwhile our boys are missing the jungle, but excited about going to school here for a few weeks.

Please Pray

For full recovery and good health

For continued language progress for us and our coworkers (who are in there alone)

For God to prepare the hearts of the Pal people to accept the truth

Thank you for making it possible for us to be here,

Mason and Kim Lockwood Ian, Andrew, Isaac, and Brayden

My Saturday Morning:

4:00 am. Our friend Kogster woke us up. He was yelling and whacking the bamboo siding on our house. His wife was having baby #8

4:15 am I entered a smoke filled hut and found the new mom in a corner with her new baby boy on the floor. The cord got cut, and the baby just laid there. “Are you going to pick it up ?” I asked. “Nope. We just watch it,” was their reply. This may be one of the reasons half of the babies here die. This one though is cute, chunky, and healthy.

6:00 am I’m showered and back in bed. (because I smelled like a campfire…as usual)

8:00 am The kids have tummies full of pancakes and run outside to play. (because 4 little boys are very noisy)

8:02 am “HELP! THE CAT IS GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!” The kids found our cat eating a 6” centipede. Mason grabbed a machete and took care of that. The cat is fine.

8:30 am I called my mom on our cell phone. Technology is wonderful. One day a little old bent over woman, topless, with a walking stick came up the trail. She would have looked the same 500 years ago. She walked up to me and said, “I don’t have cell phone service today.” It would have made an awesome commercial.

9:00am The breakfast dishes were still in the sink, and there were 5 ladies on my porch to chat. We discussed childbirth stories, gardens and how I talked to my nephew, brother and mom. Brayden (8 months) was grinning at everyone and showing off his new teeth. I learn a little more language every day.

9:30 am We had a team discussion about a dying woman. Our co-worker was chosen for the hike over to plead with her husband to go for medical help.

10:00 am My co-worker Elizabeth and I hiked the 2 minutes to the village to check in on the new mom. The ladies there taught us all about childbirth in their culture.

11:30 am I was trying to help my kids negotiate through an argument. Our big boys (Ian, 8, Andrew,7 and Isaac, 3) spent the morning sledding down a landslide on cardboard, and playing soccer with the village kids.

12:00 am Time for lunch….and a nice big pile of dishes. Which are done now, and I am writing this to you! (it is 2 pm)

Lots of things in our life are the same as yours. We still have dishes to do and a toilet to scrub. We still have to choose to be patient with our kids and walk with the Lord each day.

Thank you to all of you who pray for us and support us so that we can see people understand the completeness of what Christ has done for them!

Pray for wisdom for us as we live here hoping to show forth the love of Christ Pray too for wisdom as we raise these 4 precious little boys

A week in our life…

Monday: we bought supplies for the next 2 ½ months

Tuesday: we got on the helicopter and came back to the bush (after 6 days in town)

Wednesday: we found out an orphaned baby we had been praying for and trying to help had died. Her adopted family came to ask if we knew why it had happened.

Wednesday night: Lightning struck our house. (we are fine!)

Thursday: The stomach flu struck our family (or maybe it was the parakeet/possum soup we ate the day before?) Praise the Lord that our computer, which got puked on, is still working.

Friday: Folks from 3 hours away showed up today to sit down and eat another pot of jungle rat soup with us. We had to decline due to sickness, but Mason will hike over another day to eat and talk with them.

We recently went out for a weekend retreat for missionaries and were encouraged to remember that in every situation “for this too we have Jesus.” As I look back at this past week I remembered often that in all those situations, Christ was our wisdom, our comfort, our strength, and our protection.

We long for our Pal friends to be able to say the same thing. Pray that one day they will!

Have you ever wondered what you would do if you were really lost in the wilderness?

The other night I (Kim) discovered what I would do….

My co worker Elizabeth and I followed some folks for a couple of hours into the jungle to help a woman who was having complications from childbirth. She died before we got there. Then we decided to head back alone.

They would have led us back…but we figured we could find our way back through the jungle. (don’t ask me why we thought that) (= So after about a half hour on our own, we could not find the trail. We went up…all we could find was thick bush, we went down and it was the same way. So here’s what we did.

1. Sit down

2. Pray

3. Yell/scream really really loud.

4. Shine our flashlights to the mountain villages

What did we yell? Well, we perfected our Pal yodel (The way they yell from village to village). We yelled “the white ladies are stuck in the bush!” in 5 different languages. (the Spanish and French were just to mix it up for our sakes) We figured as long as we were making noise, it could attract help.

We yelled once or twice that we didn’t have any toilet paper so someone really needed to help us. (=

Eventually (a couple of hours later) two young men from the next mountain range over (yes we had been that obnoxious) came to get us.

So we were home before 11pm and slept safely in our own beds.

The Pal language group on the other hand is truly lost. They do not understand that the only way to the Creator is through Christ. Their lostness has been so evident here this week, the fear of the Spirits and of death bringing grown men to tears.

Pray that our relationships with them would deepen so that we could understand them better Pray for us and our co workers to learn the language very quickly Pray for energy for us as we are weary at the moment

Thanks for standing behind us and making it possible for us to be here!

Kim and Mason

The Lockwood’s Life Learning language…

1. The language we are learning has never been written down. We cannot take a class or pick up a book about it.

2. Mason puts in around 50 hours a week of formal language study, I don’t count my hours, but do as much as I can….we are feeling the urgency of getting the gospel to these people.

3. We once thought that the word for “I just had a bowel movement” meant “rolling.” (due to a misunderstanding about a dung beetle) I kept pointing to my son rolling down the hill and repeating the phrase over and over. That was in our first months…we have come a long ways since then…I hope.

4. We’ve been doing language study a total of 7 months, we are hoping to learn the language before Brayden learns English (he’s 7 mos old…he says “dada” so we are winning)

5. I am very accustomed to receiving the puzzled look of a Pal lady who is saying..”mayandapi??” What is the crazy American lady trying to say?!?!

6. We are now conversing in the language and really enjoying being able to say and hear more each day.

The Goal: That they may hear and understand God’s word in their language.

11 ways you know you are a tribal church planter…(drawn from our experiences in the last month)

1. Your 5 month old’s favorite pacifier is eaten by a great big hungry pig.

2. Your 3 year old routinely asks which country we are going to next…

3. Your 6 year old scares other kids by describing the symptoms of TB… (“and then you start to cough up blood!”)

4. Your 8 year old just caught a whole jar full of spiders the size of soft balls…and wants to eat them.

5. Seeing pigs walk by without any eyeballs is completely normal.

6. You are thinking in 3 languages

7. You get your groceries on a helicopter

8. When your friend spits on your kid’s bee sting and starts calling out to the spirits to heal it.

9. You just watched a 7 year old boy take his last breath due to a simple flu.

10. You’ve seen 5 dead bodies in 2 weeks.

11. You ache for the people around you to at least have a chance, for the first time, to hear of what Christ has accomplished for them.

Please pray for us to learn their language and culture quickly and to just show them what Christ is like as we live among the Pal Tribe here in Papua New Guinea. Pray too that they would live to hear the message we are bringing, and that their hearts would be prepared.

Thanks for praying!

Mason and Kim

1. Being the only believers and only English speakers for a very long ways. Yet really enjoying the Lord, each other, and the people God has sent us to.

2.  No e-mail, no phone coverage for most of the time, and trying to get on the radio, often only to hear people say, “is that Pal? (where we are) can anyone copy what Pal is saying?  Nope. We can’t hear them.”  We have cell phone coverage now.  But still no e-mail.  We do have more time for language study though.

3.  Shingles, impetigo, amoebic dysentery all came to visit us and a medevac yesterday to topped it all off. (=  We are out of the tribe for 1 week and our Andrew, who was very sick with the flu, is doing great now.  

4. Playing basketball with the tribal folks: homemade cigarettes in their mouths, barefoot, slipping and sliding in the mud and beetlenut spit … and having  a great time with them.  Thank the Lord for a bucket shower at the end of the day!

5. Being told that I (Kim) need to grow out my armpit hair and thumb nails in order to TRULY be one of them.

6. Trying to explain over and over again what Brayden’s pacifier is all about.  They seem to think it is some sort of magical baby feeding system.

7. Sitting on a bamboo platform in front of a hut with a woman who lost her only 2 babies in childbirth and is due again soon.

8. A phrase I hear often these days: ”Tobo parakasi rupa.”  Basically it means “the 4^th born son is drooling.”   Not sure what that one will be useful for.

9. Coming inside to make lunch after a morning outside with friends…I smelled like smoke, my leg was sore from learning to roll string out of tree bark (they roll it on the skin just above their knee), and I could still taste the roasted grasshopper I’d eaten an hour before

10. Dealing with a mother of 2 small children dying of something…and a couple of babies who had fallen in the fire and been badly burnt.

11. The husband of the woman mentioned above is dealing with her sickness not by seeking medical care, but by making offerings to territorial spirits.  If they are appeased, he believes she will be made well.  Meanwhile she gets sicker.

We are excited for the day we know their language well enough to share with them about the God who created them and cares about each and every one of them enough to die for them.  

Please pray for wisdom for us, deep relationships, and open, prepared hearts in them to accept the Gospel.

Thank you so much for standing behind us and holding us up with your prayers and support, we have felt the need for God’s sustaining and strengthening hand lately.  Servants of yours and the Pal people – for the sake of the Lord’s renown in Pal,

Mason, Kim, and the 4 boys