While vacationing in the Bahamas a few years ago, my husband and I joined a local congregation for the Sunday morning service – not expecting anything other than a good time of worship and fellowship. However, that all that changed when the associate pastor stepped up to the pulpit to greed the visitors. Rather than a casual “Thank you for joining us today,” he said that he had a prophetic word for us and then proceeded to point to my husband and prophesy. Having never met my husband or me and not knowing anything about us, he began to “read our mail,” by saying that my husband was a writer and that his books would be published all over the world. Then he turned to me and really shocked the both of us by saying that my book would go even farther than my husband’s books.
Well, if you have read my book, you’ll likely remember that it opens with a story of how I almost died in the faraway nation of Nepal – a nation steeped in Hinduism, mysticism, the occult and suppression of women. Not only does the book begin in Nepal, but the whole ministry that birthed the book also began there. When my husband first visited the Himalayan kingdom in 1992, the local leaders told him that their greatest need was for someone to come help educate and liberate the women.
Beginning the next year and continuing until today, I have made annual trips to Nepal to do just that. Today, there is a powerful army of women who have stepped forward to become leaders in the churches, aggressive soul winners, and mighty prayer warriors. Naturally, the first translation of my book was into the Nepali language.
The nation of Myanmar, also known as Burma, has also been a major focus of interest for me since the day that a young Burmese Bible college student insisted that he be allowed to enroll in my Women for the Harvest class, which was restricted to only ladies. After he graduated and returned to his home country, I visited him several times to minster in his church and hold women’s conferences. Eventually, we saw the need of making the book available in the Burmese language as well. A couple years ago, the pastor had a seizure and died while preaching the Sunday morning sermon. Heroically, his wife has stepped up to fill her husband’s shoes, but she testifies that she would never have been able to do so without the teaching and anointed she had received from the conferences and reading the book. Today, the Burmese version of Women for the Harvest is widely circulated in Myanmar, and a second translation in one of the tribal languages of the country is also available.
When I met the National Director for Every Home for Christ in Thailand, one of just a handful of women in such a high level of leadership, I knew that I had found a woman after my own heart. Before long, I was traveling with her and teaching from my book to woman all over Thailand, which she offered to translate into Thai. This past year, four thousand copies were distributed to the top pastors and Christian leaders in the nation. On the heels of the Thai translation, came a second language spoken by the tribal people in the countryside. Today, the books have been distributed throughout the nation and into neighboring Laos, where there is unprecedented growth in the churches – much of it birthed from the active roles being taken by women who have been motivated through the teaching in Women for the Harvest.
When a evangelist from Pakistan was traveling in Thailand, he ran across a copy of Women for the Harvest and contacted me, requesting permission to translate it into Urdu for distribution in his homeland. After prayer and consultation with my husband, we granted him permission and funded the project. Within months, he had finished the translation and had arranged for three thousand copies to be printed by a local printer. Unfortunately, conditions in Pakistan became so dangerous for Americans that the US Embassy had to withdraw from the country, prohibiting me from going there to hold women’s meetings and release the book. However, local Christian women are aggressively distributing the book throughout the nation, and we are getting encouraging reports of how the women’s lives are being impacted.
Just about three years ago, the Lord gave my husband and me our first open door into Europe through the nation of Hungary. When I began to go to Hungary and share with the people that it was through the ministry of a woman (Lydia in Acts 16) that the continent of Europe was opened to the gospel, the people were amazed and blessed – and the women began to be eager to take their rightful place in the Body of Christ. Before long, the women were asking for the book in their language, and a young lady stepped forward volunteering to do the translation. The Hungarian version of Women for the Harvest was the first local European translation, but not the last! The German version is presently in the final review stage and will probably be ready to be ready for printing this summer.
Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the world, and Women for the Harvest is now available for the nations that speak this tongue. The official release of the Spanish version will be next month at a women’s conference in the Dominican Republic.
When I heard that prophetic word that Sunday morning in the Bahamas, I could never have imagined that anything like this would ever happen with those words that I wrote on those yellow legal pads at my kitchen table. Little could I have ever imagined that a young Filipina girl living in England would get hold of the book and transfer to college in the US just to sit in my class at Charis and after graduation would return to he homeland of the Philippines and translate the book for her native people, our eleventh language and counting. But God has done it – and is still making it happen!
The income I receive from books sales here in the US falls several thousand dollars short of what I spend each year to translate and publish books for all the foreign countries. If you would like to help spread this message around the world, I would encourage you to visit our website to make an online gift.
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