Lai Ro Thanga is a long time friend and pastor in Yangon, Myanmar. He first took an interest in the “little book”, Simple Truths for the New Believer a half dozen years ago and translated the book into Burmese and Mizo-Chin for the churches there. Since that time, Rova (as he first introduced himself on my first visit to Burma) has been responsible for printing, distributing, and training pastors in the use of the book. He has printed thousands of books and distributed them widely to pastors and church planters in multiple denominations.

Several months ago, Rova asked if we could assist with translation costs to put the Travel Guide to the Bible into Burmese and Mizo-Chin. God provided the funds. The projects were started. Then the troubles in Myanmar increased.

Myanmar’s elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested after the country’s military seized power in February 2021. The event sparked wide scale protests, armed resistance and mass killings. Most recently, government forces have burned more than 100 villages and more than 12,000 people have been killed in conflicts throughout the country. People in the nation’s capital have had to live through food shortages and restrictions of services in many parts of the city. The military government allows electricity to the city for only 12 hours a day. Sometimes, they provide no electricity to parts of the city at all.

Rova last communicated a few weeks ago to say that he believes that “the translation, editing and typing will go well and smooth. Please keep praying for us that we will finish the project well even though we have been very much slower than I thought.”

I do not think often enough (nor pray often enough) for the persecuted people around the world. There are so, so many of them. We have books that have made their way (electronically) among the few Uyghur believers in Western China and border nations, who are facing, as a people group, some of the most intense troubles. Our books are in Ukrainian, where there is war. Simple Truths has been in the hands of people groups living in more than half of the nations listed by Open Doors where Christians are most persecuted.

We have often thought of what we do in terms of the parable of the sower. We try to be both strategic, but also indiscriminate in how we sow the gospel seed. That means that we have thousands of books (especially electronic versions) that have ended up in places that often surprise us. What “heart soil” these seeds have fallen on, we do not always know. But we pray, that in places we will not know until we are in glory, that it is finding good soil – and the result is a crop “a hundred times more than we have sown.”

Please join us in that prayer.