| Distressed & downcast, sheep without a shepherd (The Prices Write, Nov. 2015, part 1) View this e-mail online if it doesn't display correctly. |
| | Dear prayer warriors,
Being with family and friends on this furlough has been wonderful (Pam is pictured above with her mom, Barbie, and sister, Kim, here in KC). It has been great to be able to travel and see many of you as we have now spoken at most of our supporting churches. We will be speaking at six more churches, and believe it or not, it is just over two months until we return to Hungary.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about praying the Scriptures for missions. One excellent passage is Matthew 9:35-38, which ends with Jesus commanding, ”Therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest." As the Lord Jesus traveled, He saw the crowds and had compassion on them. Many of them were poor. Some were lepers. No one would come near them and certainly no one else would touch them. But He did touch and heal them. They were “like sheep without a shepherd”, “distressed and downcast”. Jesus compared them to a harvest which was ready to be reaped, yet sadly, there were not enough harvesters to bring in the harvest. So He ends by telling us to ask the Lord of the harvest, to send more laborers into the harvest.
As I look at the Roma (Gypsies) in Europe today, that is exactly what I see. They are “distressed and downcast”. A recent report about the Roma in Hungary said, “Today approximately 750,000 Roma live in Hungary. Thousands of Hungarian Roma were killed for being Roma during the Holocaust. Later the Roma worked largely in sectors which went bankrupt after the democratic transition of Hungary in 1990 (mining, heavy industry) and they have not yet recovered: today, only 26% of working-age Roma are employed…. The areas where Hungarian Roma live are mainly disadvantaged areas and small villages where there are no job opportunities. The average life expectancy for Roma in Hungary is ten to twelve years less than for non-Roma…. Hungary’s Supreme Court recently declared that the segregation of Roma children in church schools is legal.”
Roma in Europe are often “sheep without a shepherd” (like the Roma children from NW Croatia pictured below). They lack spiritual leaders to care for them and teach them God’s truth. There are not enough messengers to proclaim to them God’s Good News. For many of them there is no Bible yet in their dialect. Ask the Lord of the harvest to send missionaries among the Roma. This includes American missionaries like us, but also missionaries from other places including from Europe itself, as well as national missionaries, such as Croats in Croatia, Serbs in Serbia and Hungarians in Hungary.
And pray for Roma themselves. The most important link in the chain of Bible translation for Roma is Roma. It is their mother tongue, their culture and their people. Perhaps the greatest need at this moment is for God to raise up scores of Roma who have a passion to translate the Bible into their heart languages. From my perspective, we could still use several hundred missionaries to work among the Roma, including foreign missionaries, national missionaries and Roma. So, please ask the Lord of the harvest to send forth workers into His harvest among the Roma. Thank you.
Todd, Pamala, Matthew, Kirsten, Daniel and Ariela Price
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