News and prayer information from Richard and Pinuccia Wilson

I often say that my Bible study computer program gets distributed and used a lot more than the simple accesses and downloads from my site would indicate. Occasionally I get feedback to remind me about this. For example, this morning I received an e-mail from a Catholic priest, that I translate here:

On February 26 I participated at the annual meeting for the priests of the city of Rome with our bishop, the Pope Benedict XVI. Entering in the room, I found on every seat a free booklet, of a certain Pietro Principe, called “Essential Guide to the Holy Bible”, Vatican Publishing House, 2008. On page 4 there was a brief mention of the theme “Bible and Internet”. It says, “There are many Internet sites dedicated to the Bible: an extraordinary wealth for knowing and studying the Word of God. Amongst the principal references we find…” and then follows a list of 11 sites, in which at fourth place is laparola.net. Personally, I add that some of those mentioned are not really sites on the Bible, but useful databases of pastoral material, and the others can not be compared with the quality of laparola.net and the program LaParola.

Whilst my computer ministry is important, especially the distribution of the Bible and Bible study tools at LaParola.net, it is hard to connect it with a church planting ministry, which is the main direction of my ministry. Internet has the advantage of reaching everyone, but it is also a disadvantage because it is hard to focus on one particular geographical area. So whilst I have helped church plants in all of Italy, the effect at Trento has been minimal. So it was encouraging to me that the church received an e-mail last week from a user of my site from a town in the mountains near Trento, who was happy to discover that I was from Trento as well, found out about the church through the links on my site, and so wrote asking about meetings. Then he went to the Monday night Bible study group last night with a friend. He has been living at Milan and seems to have been converted there, and soon will be going to live in London, whilst the friend is “just looking” at this stage. But after more than a decade, someone has come to a church meeting because of LaParola.net, and I am happy that it has happened.

My regular readers may have noticed that I have been off the air for the last few days. Unfortunately, on short notice my old server could no longer host my site, so I have had to transfer it to a new server and reconstruct the site there. It is mostly up and running now, although in the Italian part of laparola.net (which is the main part of the site) there are still a couple of things I need to fix up. In this blog, I lost my last post (which was written after my last weekly back up) and for some reason all the categories of the messages.

To catch up then… The main point of the lost post was that Daniele’s operation was cancelled again. This time it was because he had a cold and was all blocked up, which is not a good time to have a general anaesthetic. So now we will try again in Spring.

Then last week I was in Madrid for one of the regular six monthly meetings of the leaders of the mission. (I usually have problems with my web sites when I am away, and it is hard for me to do anything about it.) The meeting went well, but it was the worst trip I have ever made. I have to go Verona-Rome-Madrid when I make my trips there, and there was industrial action by the ground staff of the airport at Rome which delayed everything. On my way to Madrid, the plane gave up waiting for the luggage to be loaded and left anyway, so all the passengers arrived with nothing. My bag arrived the following morning. On the way back, the plane was late and I missed my connection to Verona, so the airline put me in a hotel to get some sleep (although I didn’t get there until 1am), and I caught the first flight on the next morning, which was also one hour late. But I did get home by 1pm – which did create some problems for Pinuccia and her work as well.

Anyway, it is all back to normal again now, and this week should have all the usual events and I hope no out of the ordinary problems to look after.

There were no less than three birthday parties in the church this weekend. The first was for Stefania, who turned three on Saturday, and so some of the children (and parents) in the church came to our house in the afternoon. Then on Sunday there were two separate lunches to celebrate birthdays, one for one of the teenagers who turned 16 that the people in the young adults’ group went to, and one for another person in the church that the older people went to.

This made me reflect on how the church and I have changed since I have been here. First of all, since the teenager was born a month after I arrived in Italy, I feel a special identification with her when I think about my time in Italy and the growth that I have seen. Secondly, it used to be pretty rare that we would celebrate three birthdays on the same weekend, as the church wasn’t large enough. And we would never have had two events at the same time. The church used to be small enough that everyone would be invited to everything. That is no longer possible, and now we have the disadvantage of a medium sized church that you can’t know everybody well. Of course, the advantages in our case outweigh the disadvantages, and because of the small groups (including the young adults) there is the same close fellowship in different sections of the congregation, even if not in all at the same time. So we can organise two birthday parties at the same time, and there is no problem. This is certainly a lot different to the situation 16 years ago! The third reflection was due to the fact that I was invited to the old peoples’ party, not to the young adults’ party. I’ll let you decide what it made me think… But I managed to get back towards the “young” side again, because the teenagers are missing a bit our meetings now that they are just the three youngest people in the young adults’ group. So Pinuccia and I have organised a meeting for them at our house next Saturday (or possibly, if that doesn’t work, the following Saturday), for “old times’ sake”, to find out how they are going spiritually and to pray together (and eat pizzas and watch a video, naturally).

During the week, there was a Bible reading marathon, in which the whole Bible was read on the state TV’s satellite channel over 7 days, with 1200 celebrities and “normal” people reading. What I personally found interesting and encouraging was that when I mentioned it on my Italian language blog about things to do with the Bible (at http://www.laparola.net/blog/?postid=235), there was a flood of comments – 25 so far, and they are still arriving. Usually there are no comments on my messages, and at most there are two. I was starting to think that there weren’t even 25 readers of my blog! So I was encouraged to keep going. It was also a indication that the public diffusion of the Bible in Italy does create interest, even though it is not always apparent or visible. Which is the reason why I keep my Italian Bible site and free computer program going, even if I don’t get a lot of feedback from it. The desire is there to hear and read the Bible in Italy.

Stefania has successfully overcome her first week of pre-school. She quite enjoyed it, and looked forward to going each day. She didn’t actually speak to the other children or the teachers (in either language), but she did at least play with some others instead of playing by herself with other children around, which is what she has usually done in the pat. Next week it is a step up to 2.5 hours per day. The hardest part for her will be getting up earlier in order to be at school by 9am. She is definitely a night person! However, she gets Monday off, as it is Lavis’ patron saint’s day. Whereas Pinuccia, who works at Trento, will have to go to work.

The meetings at our house during the week to prepare for the Sunday School and welcoming ministries went well. I have ended up with the 7-10 year old class, which has five children in it. I share it with Pinuccia and another lady, so we each miss only one out of every three sermons. It will be an interesting time for me! The classes will start on September 21, although it will be sometime in October when I have to give my first lesson.

In the meantime, tomorrow (Saturday) there is another bookstall at Rovereto, the first of the monthly bookstalls after the summer break. There is also a fair on in the town, so there should be quite a few people around. I was supposed to be or wanted to be at two other places as well. The organisation for missionaries in Italy is having its biennial mission conference at the moment – I heard that there are more than 250 people present, which is far more than any expectation. And the theological institute at Padua (2.5 hours away) is having their annual training weekend. Since the church does a lot together with the institute (including a few members doing courses there, and one of the elders teaching there), quite a few church members have gone there. It has left us a bit short handed for the bookstall, but there will be enough people present and it is good to see some of the newer people in the church helping out at Rovereto.

Today was also release day for a new version (7.05) of my program, with some of the changes that I had managed to do whilst we were in Australia. It is a bit of work getting all the files ready for distribution, backing up the new files, changing the site and writing messages in the various places were I announce new versions, so it takes most of a day to do it.

Although I had few of the normal activities for the last few days, I have been kept busy mostly with other things. On Friday evening the ladies’ group came – the house has to be more than spotless when a dozen women come to visit. Then there was the teenagers’ meeting on Saturday afternoon, that indirectly kept me busy – since Pinuccia had to prepare the study, I had to look after the children more than usual. Immediately after that meeting we went out to the town band’s annual dinner. Then on Sunday, as well as the church service, there were volleyball and soccer matches organised by the church in a gymnasium in the afternoon, and then out for dinner with some friends from church.

But the major new thing is that finally I released today a major upgrade of my computer program to study the Bible. It was in fact a complete rewrite of the program, as the limitations of the previous version (that in some parts still reflected choices that I made in the first version that I wrote 12 years ago!) meant that it was becoming increasingly difficult to improve it. The rewrite took longer than I expected – almost two years – but that was due also to my having less time now than previously. I noticed that there was a sudden slow down in the writing of the program three months ago, which happens to coincide with Daniele’s birth. As the program does exist in English as well as Italian, if you want to see what I have done you can download it from http://www.laparola.net/program/ .

We had a good time in Tuscany this week. Pinuccia commented that it was good to have a “change of air” from the usual activities at home. Being able to talk with others in similar situations to us (missionaries, cross cultural marriages, father working at home, two small children) was helpful as well. I also came back with requests to do three new web sites (or at least set them up so that others can put in the material and update them), so I will be working on those for the next few weeks as well.
After a day in church and resting today, tomorrow it is really back to work, with studies on the first three days of the week for me, then leading the Sunday School teachers’ meeting for Pinuccia (whilst I do the double baby sitting) and the teenagers meeting at our house on Saturday.
The results from Daniele’s blood test had arrived in the post whilst we were away. From what I can work out, it doesn’t look like he has any problems any more with the thyroid, but it is hard to interpret what the results actually mean. We’ll find out for sure in the next couple of days when we take the results back to the pediatrician at the hospital. I’ll let you know.

This afternoon there was the Reformation Day service in church, to remember the principles on which the church is founded. So we looked back at what some of these principles were, and our guest speaker reminded us that the real reformation starts from a personal encounter with God, which then can change external forms, even though when it is questioned it is usually on the basis of the forms that are reformed, and not on what changed inside the people. There were also about 10 people who visited from three Italian churches in the mostly German speaking half of the region, churches with which we have a good fellowship but not had much time together with recently, so it was good to be reminded of our fellowship through this concrete experience of it.

Yesterday was also Remembrance Day, remembering those who died in the wars. Here at Lavis there was a ceremony this morning at the war memorial, where the band played the national anthem and a few other patriotic songs. It worked out well, since it is the only Sunday in the year when there is no church service in the morning, so I was able to play at the ceremony. We were fortunate that we are having an unusual warm spell at the moment (it would have been about 10 degrees), so although the feet froze when we stopped marching and had to stand still during the ceremony, and the cold hands made playing instruments rather difficult, it could have been a lot worse!

Yesterday I also managed to finish another beta version of the next version of my Italian Bible computer program. I have recently found some pieces of time that I can use for the computer work (in the afternoon when I look after Stefania, I can let her play or watch TV in the lounge whilst I work on my laptop there), so hopefully I can be more productive
with the computer ministry now.

This is one of the exceptions to getting one night free a week, as I mentioned last week. Today is a public holiday, so I have both today and tomorrow night free. Public holidays used to be a bit of a nuisance to me, as it didn’t change much except I was able to do less because the shops were changed. Having a family though changes things a bit… Since Pinuccia was at home all day as well, we did some decorating the house together, took Stefania to the park (probably the last time for a few months – it is getting too cold), and will watch a movie tonight (at least that is the plan, it depends if Stefania lets us). I did get a few things done for myself however, in particular fixing up the second last problem before I release the next beta version of my Bible program. I haven’t been able to do much programming at all lately (as I do it in the time left over from church commitments and preparation, with has become a lot less with Stefania taking priority as well), but know that I have got a few weeks ahead in my preparation I hope to do a bit more now.

At the moment there is the second half of a rarity: two nights off during the week (that is excluding Sundays). Usually the maximum is one, which I guard jealously to at least have some time with the family. But the way the church programs work out, every eight weeks I get both Thursday and Friday free. (Although occasionally I do get bonus nights, when a Bible study meeting is not held because of lack of people, a public holiday or other reasons.) I’ve taken advantage of these nights to get some non-deadlined computer work done, for example creating a search engine for Italian Evangelical web sites, looking into ways for people to insert the Italian Bible text on my site into their sites, and doing some work on the site of a friend involved in another ministry in Italy.