It was a busy day. It always seems to be that way the day before we leave the village to go back to Port Moresby for supplies. Aside from cleaning up, there are checklists of items to be purchased in the city and things to be taken down and safely stored away until we return. On top of this, there were Bible lessons to print out for our church elder, Tom, to study with the young men while we were gone. I wrote the Bible lessons several years ago using simple English, and Johanna added colorful pictures and illustrations to go along with the messages. But we had not printed any new lessons in a while, and some minor modifications needed to be made. The previous night I had printed a trial copy of Lesson 1 but threw it in the trash when I realized the reverse side was printed upside down.

I was starting to feel a bit overwhelmed that day, trying to keep the young men who work for us busy. Though these young men are not baptized church members yet, they are regular attendees at our worship services. I prayed for help. Then I remembered a task that would be easy to assign to one or two of the boys. Our trash needed to be burned. When Laurie brought out the big plastic bag of garbage, one of the boys immediately asked for permission to keep the plastic bag. “Sure,” I said, but I stood by to make sure that all our confidential papers got burned. Dumping the bag’s contents out on the lawn, another boy spotted the Lesson-1 reject I had thrown away the night before. Picking it up, he slowly read the title aloud. “Where did Evil Come From?” I watched as he showed it to the other guys. I explained that it was a reject and that Uncle Tom would be giving them the same lesson in their Bible class. I expected the boy to throw it into the fire, but he didn’t. Instead he neatly folded up his treasure and put it in his pocket. A warm feeling came over me, not from the fire, but because I was reminded why we are here among people hungry for biblical truth. I could almost hear Jesus’ voice saying to me, “Feed my sheep.”

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