By Chris Urton
I was all set to go out to Igoi to conduct the Comprehension Checking of chapters 13 through 24 of Luke in the Sob language. I was going to be there for 25 days. Previously we had held these checking sessions in the evening at our house. That way people could still do their normal work (working in gardens, building and repairing houses, building fences around their gardens, gathering food, water and firewood, etc.) that they needed to do during the daytime.
When I arrived in Igoi on January 31st I found that the shutoff on the solar charge controller had tripped. Historically it had tripped before when we had close lightning strikes. I reset the shutoff and waited to see the condition of the batteries. Unfortunately the weather was not cooperating. February is part of the rainy season in our area of PNG. Solar panels don’t work too well if it is cloudy, rainy and foggy. So I started up the generator to get the batteries charged.
After running the generator for 2 hours the batteries got up to 13.4 volts. But as soon as I shut the generator off they went back down to 8.9 volts. So I proceeded to isolate each of the four batteries to find out if I had any good batteries that could hold a charge.
My 10 year old batteries had finally bit the dust. Now how was I going to do the checking in the evenings without having lights in the house?
Sunday came and after worship I brought up the situation. They understood the dilemma. They decided that Thursdays could be used for the checking and also Sunday afternoons.
So we worked on 3 Thursdays and on 2 Sunday afternoons and we were able to complete the comprehension checking of Luke. I thought that the entire stay was going to be a disaster because of my limited amount of electricity. But this scenario actually worked quite well for us. Sometimes God just changes things up to force us to rely upon his direction for our problems.
Chris is a Bible translator serving the Sob language group.