Not long ago, I received this encouraging report from the coordinator for The Word for the World Serbia/Croatia:
In September 2021, the translation team distributed the Gospel of Luke and 50 Bible stories in the Roma community in Leskovac, Serbia. One of the translators, Saša [English spelling Sasha], invited his neighbors, some of whom are unconverted people, including Muslims to this event. At the end of December, one of the Muslim women told him that she had read some stories from the book that she received in September, though solely with the intention of finding errors and incorrect Romani words in the text. Considering that she had respect for the book as the Christian Holy Book and that she was glad that this book is being translated into Roma Arli dialect, she suggested that the translator correct some words which she considered incorrect and borrowed. The translator was not too discouraged by the fact that she tried to find mistakes, because it implies that she, as a Muslim, had to read the text, if only to look for errors. We believe that the Word of God always finds a way to reach the hearts of the unconverted, and Saša realized that this was the way God used to reach this woman. And besides, he got even more motivated to be precise in translating.
Thank you for praying for the translation work. Here are some updates: Today Zoki and Todd finished the spell check and key word check in the Ludari language for the Gospel of Luke, 50 chronological Bible stories and the glossary. This represents many hours of painstaking, tedious checking of words and also details such as making sure that quotes in footnotes are formatted correctly, that all sets of quotation marks have the correct opening and closing, that the wording in the footnotes is consistent, that parallel passages in other places are handled correctly and that the glossary entries match what we have in the translation. Our Croatian teammate, Sergej, has been amazing in his detailed work on this as well. Please give praise to God for his strength and enablement to get this done. Praise God that the Ludari translators are now healthy and please pray for them as they finish the community check of the last three chapters of Luke. Please also pray for those who are making the audio recordings of Luke and the 50 stories, for accurate and quality recordings. Praise God for answering prayer that we now have a full team of translators for three of the languages (Arli, Gurbet and Chergash) and can continue with the project to translate more of the New Testament. We will be traveling to Oklahoma City this weekend to visit Todd’s mom in the nursing home and for Todd to teach the Adult Bible Fellowship class and preach at Heritage Baptist Church (watch online at 10:30 Sunday here).
Thank you for your faithful prayers. Todd | 
