News and prayer information from Richard and Pinuccia Wilson

We arrived back home from Sicily on Friday afternoon. Just enough time to get unpacked, sort the house out, and have a bit of a rest, before the other three go back to school tomorrow. And I get back to preparing Bible studies, other meetings, and programming. As usual, a lot of our time in Sicily was spent with friends and relatives, eating a lot and having late nights. The nights certainly disrupted the children’s usual life style, although in some ways it did make life it a bit easier for me. I tended to go to bed at my normal time, but with the children exhausted and waking up a lot later than usual I could catch up on some rest and sleep in a bit, and still have time to get some work done before the rest of the family woke up.

This morning in church we heard a report from a group of young people that went to a large (3000 people) youth missionary congress in Germany over the New Year. There were eight from the church who went, together with two others from other churches at Trento and who attend the GBU group at the university. Since most of the participants read this on Facebook, I won’t go into the personal details. But it was great to hear each one of them say what they had learnt and experienced at the congress, and what helped them at this particular moment of their walk with God.

Finally, a message that I received late yesterday:

I read the Bible every night thanks to your mailing list and I am grateful! I had never read it before, except small pieces when I was a child, without understanding anything. How many questions that arise, and how many answers I find! Now I understand. Thank you, I would like to shake your hand and hug you with this e-mail.

Like everybody else, this week coming up to Christmas is different from normal. I only have the one Bible study to go to, which will be a more informal affair with a video and eating to finish up the year, before starting a new series on Isaiah in January. On the other hand, there is the band’s biggest concert of the year on Friday night (a co-production with a local dancing school in the town’s indoor sports centre, with more than a hundred performers), so there are some extra rehearsals for that. School for the other three family members ends on Thursday, and there will be a bit of a rest on Friday. But not too much, because it will also be packing day, as we head to Sicily on Saturday, to see that half of our family for the first time for a year. We will be back on January 6th. I will have limited Internet time whilst there, which means little blogging and Facebooking, so I will take this opportunity to wish all my friends reading this a meaningful Christmas and God filled New Year.

Tomorrow there will also be the launch of the first beta of a new version of my computer program to read and study the Bible in Italian. It is a multiplatform version, for Mac, Linux and Android. It is fairly simple at the moment, but I hope to develop it a lot more during 2012. Hopefully it will satisfy the users of those operating systems who have been asking me for years for such a program. And hopefully it will been that the program is tool for making the Word of God known even more, as it reaches still more Italian computers.

With all the cell group Bible studies until the summer prepared, and just one study to go over and one to prepare for the Youth Group this week, this was the first of my Project Weeks, working on some things in my computer ministry. There were three major projects. The first was adding two new countries into the Italian Operation World web site. Others do the translating, my job is to enter the data into the site, and I will be doing two countries a week for at least the next two months. The second was writing short comments on some Bible verses, which will become a resource available on my Bible web site and computer program, to answer the common questions that I receive about the Bible. The aim is to do a comment every day for the next few months. The third was some computer programming – my favourite hobby. This week it was some Javascript coding, writing a small utility that others can add to their web site in order to automatically display the Bible text in Italian whenever they have written a Bible reference on a web page. It should be ready for its public release around Tuesday, and then I will decide which programming project to work on next – I have a list of quite a few to choose from.

This week will see the next official step in the Rovereto church plant, with the Annual Church Meeting of the Trento church on Sunday afternoon. It is hard to get excited about AGMs usually, but this time the church will formally be giving the go ahead to the new church, so that will be exciting.

Various happenings for this week and next:

1. Next Saturday afternoon at our house there will be a meeting for the new Youth Group. It will actually be the second meeting, but the first that I will be going to (since I was in Spain last time), and the first study. So for me it feels like it is just starting now. So please pray for this time together.

2. Yesterday I received the following e-mail:

I wanted to tell you that I have begun to study the Bible, using your Internet site. I am happy to be able to count on your help.

Just an encouraging remind for me that my site on the Bible (http://www.laparola.net/english.html) is used and helpful for Italians to get to know the Bible better. Unfortunately in this period, with a lot of Bible studies to prepare, I am not able to work on improving the site, but it is sitting out there in cyberspace doing its job anyway. And I do keep up with the e-mail correspondence that I receive as a result of the site.

3. This week turned out to be astronomy week at our house. We were reading one of Stefania’s books to her, and it started talking about stars and planets. She was really interested, so we found other material (books, DVDs, a planetarium program on the computer) on them, and she really enjoyed all of it. Unfortunately, when we went out to look at the real thing, we were just able to see one star. It is a problem with living in the city, especially with 2000 meter high walls (the mountains) blocking out most of the horizon. We will probably have to wait until we go to Sicily at the end of the year before we can get her to admire God’s handiwork in the heavens.

A bit of feedback from my Italian bible site. Three years ago a lady wrote to me saying:

What you do is great and I need to thank you because I have used the site which has helped me. I have lots of Bibles at home, but the commentary of Enrico Bosio [an evangelical commentary written about 100 years ago, which is on my site] was very important for me, because it is very good, deep but written in a simple style. It is true that I can not accept all of it, given that I am Catholic, however it has helped me a lot and I will continue to consult it.

This week she wrote again:

A few years have passed since I last wrote to you. Then I was Catholic, but now I have passed to the evangelical faith. I am telling you this because you have had a part in my spiritual work, that you had through the site http://www.laparola.net/, and I thank you again.

Since then I have found out a bit more about her, how she has changed her believes (and not just her church), and that the main help she has had in this change was from another evangelical site, where she has had a few debates on line and where her questions have been answered. I also found out that she is 74 years old. She is certainly not in my usual demographic audience, but it was good to hear how the Word of God has been electronically working in her life as well!

A few little bits of news this week:

• I finally managed to get version 7.14 of my Bible computer program, and the corresponding update to my web site, out on Tuesday.
• During the week there was another birth in the church (who is also in the new Saturday cell group, so there are 6 couples and 10 children less than 5 years old now). This meant there was only one pregnancy left (in the church and Saturday group), which is due next month. So I was a bit worried that our church growth program was coming to a stand still, but today another couple came to the rescue and announced a pregnancy. It was especially pleasing to see them announcing it, as they are the same age as me and Pinuccia, and have been waiting for a while. At least they are not in the Saturday cell group!
• Yesterday was one of our few completely free Saturdays, and with the warmer weather we took advantage of it. In the morning there was the first family leisure bike ride – although only Stefania rode, Daniele and I walked (but Daniele did have his first try on the bike for a few metres). In the afternoon there was a trip for the whole family to the largest castle of the province, to go exploring there. Now that the children are old enough to enjoy so days (and do all the walking that is required), we are looking forward to being able to do more such days together. However, it does mean setting apart the time to do them, which is not also easy with my ministry. So it means for me making a conscious decision to do less work and more family time, which is not easy for me to do, although I am learning.

This weekend there are a few events to pray for:

• Sunday School teacher training and planning on Saturday morning, which Pinuccia will be leading. Then there is the cell group in the afternoon, so there will be no family time that day
• Lunch together after church on Sunday, and then the annual general meeting of the church. Although I will miss most of it, because I also have…
• a concert with the band on Sunday afternoon, for the big annual market day of Lavis

The main aim for this week was to get out a new version of my Bible computer program. I didn’t make it though. The program itself is ready, with a few new features. But with a couple of other people I have never met, one in America and one in Hungary, I have been working on an improved version of the Westcott and Hort Greek New Testament (which is arguably the best Greek text available without copyright, for which it is fairly popular in Internet). There are quite a few electronic versions available, but they all have many errors. So the three of us have been comparing texts for a while. But now that I have more time (having finished the preparation of all the studies I have to lead until June), we have been having a concentrated effort on the improvement of this text. So in the last two weeks the e-mails have been flying between us, comparing and checking various versions of the text. We are almost there, with only a couple of hundred punctuation marks left to check and correct. So at the beginning of next week, I should finally be able to get version 7.14 of my program out, and also update the texts on the page of my site on the Greek New Testament.

In the meantime, during the week I received a message from one of my users. One of many, that encourages me to keep putting in the time necessary to keep the computer ministry going:

I wanted to complement you for the wonderful site; I discovered it by chance when, at an evening meeting, the priest advised us to read the Bible to understand it better. So, looking on Internet, I discovered your site. Through it I will try my spiritual walk that I desire so much, but that I did not know how to do, fearful of not being able to understand by myself the Bible. Now, with your help, and that of the Holy Spirit, I will try with more peace.

I went to Spain and back again this week. Two and a half days of meetings, but it was a good time. In particular, there was a day dedicated to thinking about what it means to be a part of ECM in each country, which is what the ECM missionaries in Italy have been thinking about for a while. It will be helpful for tomorrow, as we will all (that is, the whole family) be going to one of the regular meetings together of the Italian ECM missionaries. And we will be discussing some of these matters that we talked about in Spain. In the meantime, the rest of the family coped without me, with a few visitors and a parade in our town for the Carnival celebrations to keep them busy. We then had a good reunion day together on Friday, going to play in the snow and do other things together.

Yesterday I played at a concert with the Lavis band, together with three other bands. Before the concert, a member of one of the other bands searched me out. It turned out that he is a happy user of my computer program to study the Bible, had seen that I played in the band at Lavis, and had been waiting for such an opportunity to meet me. As I often say, my program gets used a lot more than I know about.

We were supposed to be, at the moment, in the middle of four heavy days. But Stefania got a fever on Thursday night, which meant that we dropped out of a lot of our commitments, and life became a bit easier. On Saturday afternoon, I went to the Bible study in the Valsugana by myself, and on Saturday night we did not go to the annual dinner for the band. This morning there was an important event for the Sunday School, with a market to raise money for a school in India. So Pinuccia, after having down a lot of the preparation, had to miss it to stay home with Stefania, and got others to do what she had to do. But it went well, with the children singing a new song I had written and then saying what they were thankful for that they had receiving from God (instead of complaining about what they don’t have, when many have a lot less), with about €1100 being raised.

Today there was also a Christmas market at Lavis. We did go out for it, to get a bit of fresh air, but did not last very long before Stefania got tired and her temperature started going up, so we returned home early. Tuesday is a public holiday, and so many people – including the schools – take Monday off as well to get a long weekend. So Stefania and Pinuccia will both be at home. We were intending to make a trip to visit some of Pinuccia’s relatives, but that got put off as well due to Stefania’s illness. So we get a day at home (and maybe some shopping) instead. Then on Tuesday, there is an important event to pray for: an all day conference on the Evangelical Faith and the Reformation. It will be good to have such a conference on the holiday dedicated to the immaculate conception (of Mary, not Jesus), in a hall just a few meters from where the Council of Trent was held. Pray that we of the church would learn more about our doctrine, and that there will be many people not from the church that come as well. Then on Wednesday, there will be another talk on Calvin (for his 500th anniversary) in a Catholic study centre.

With these conferences being held, the cell groups on those days will not be held. This means that last Wednesday I gave my last Bible study for the year, with our departure for Australia being next Monday. I still however have one Sunday School lesson to prepare for next Sunday. I have also finished preparing all the Bible studies on 1Chronicles that I will be giving until summer (but there are still 6 studies on the Apostles’ Creed to prepare). This means that I will be able to dedicate all my work time this week to finishing the next version of my computer program, which I hope to release before we leave for Australia.

Despite what I said last time, I did end up having one Bible study to prepare this week. One of the other Sunday School teachers asked me to swap, as she could come to church today. But it did mean that I had almost a week to work out how to make a Passover door that would transform into a cross with Christ, our Passover lamb. The extra time this week also gave me the opportunity to finish and release a new version (7.10) of my computer program (http://www.laparola.net/program/).

This week will see a bit of a return of normality, with some Bible studies to do, and on Thursday my in-laws return to Sicily, so we will be less spoilt and I will have to do more work around the house. This time we will get just a bit more than a day without guests, because on Friday afternoon the German “twin” band of the town band that I play in will be arriving for a few concerts over the weekend, and a couple of them will be staying at our house.