Where Heaven Came Down: Week of August 22, 2026
Where Heaven Came Down: stories of God breaking through, around the world and around the corner.
Friend, this week heaven came down in places most of us never think to look. It came down in the hands of Deaf translators on four continents, who finished the book of Esther in seven sign languages at once and showed that a work everyone assumed would take centuries can be done in years. It came down in a Colombian jungle, where an Oklahoma farm girl is raising pigs so Indigenous churches can fund their own gospel work. It came down in the mud of Muncie, Indiana, where volunteers who had just finished gutting flooded houses in West Virginia loaded their tools and drove west to do it again. And it came down on two Tennessee campuses, where three young adults traded a normal first year out of college for the chance to sit with students who are quietly running out of hope. Four glimpses of the gospel on the move.
Heaven came down in a language you can see
When Deaf Pathway Global set out to test a new way of translating the Bible, they did not start with a dense theological letter. They started with Esther. One hundred sixty seven verses, short enough to prove a method, and full of the kind of vivid, visual drama that sign language carries beautifully. DPG began in 2020 as a joint venture of Brentwood Baptist Deaf Church in Tennessee and the International Mission Board, and its president, IMB missionary Nick Jungheim, is Deaf himself. His team built the project on what they call sign roots: the movements, facial expressions and use of visual space that Deaf people share across cultures, whether or not they know each other’s formal sign language.
The result is a global first. DPG has now completed Esther in American, Hungarian, Slovenian, Serbian, Senegalese, Chinese and Thai Sign Language, all at once, with teams sharpening one another’s work instead of laboring alone. Consider the math they are up against. The American Sign Language Bible took thirty seven years on its own, and there are an estimated 300 to 400 sign languages in the world. At the old pace, Scripture for the Deaf would take thousands of years. “To my knowledge, nothing like this has even been attempted before,” Jungheim said. Luke is next, and this month a new Filipino Sign Language team launches in Davao City. Ever since George Liele carried the gospel to Jamaica, God has kept handing His church better ways to get the Word into hands that are reaching for it.
Pray for the seven translation teams and the new Filipino team in Davao City, for the millions of Deaf people who have never held Scripture in their heart language, and for Deaf churches raising up their own translators and pastors.
Source: International Mission Board (global)
Heaven came down in a Colombian pig pen
Taylor McConnell kept her introduction simple at an IMB interview conference. “I’m Taylor. I’m from Oklahoma, and I’m a farm girl.” She grew up on a pig farm, took an animal science degree from Oklahoma State, and spent years assuming all of it pointed toward veterinary school. Somewhere in Colombia, a missionary team was praying for someone who knew how to work with animals. Pigs, specifically. The position had never even been posted. When McConnell heard what the project involved, she said what anyone would say. “It was so specific. Only the Lord could line that up.” The team wrote the job description, she applied, and today she serves as an IMB Journeyman in Colombia.
The project now runs at eight locations tied to Indigenous churches. Each receives three pigs and hands-on training in care, breeding and sustainable feeding. As the animals reproduce, believers keep them, share them or sell them, and the income helps churches cover the cost of getting to villages where they preach. Reaching some of these congregations takes a full day: a long bus ride, hours in a vehicle, then four to eight hours by boat. McConnell pairs every agricultural lesson with a lesson on biblical stewardship, which is harder than it sounds, because some of the Indigenous languages have no word for it. “These pigs are from the Lord. The crops are from the Lord. Your time is from the Lord,” she teaches. It is working. After one training session ended, a national partner and several church members stayed behind and shared Christ with two men. The next morning the men said they had trusted Jesus. Meanwhile a 7.4 magnitude earthquake has shaken the country, and Send Relief is coordinating disaster response through those same churches, which now have something to give.
Pray for Taylor McConnell as she finishes her Journeyman term, for the eight churches learning to steward what God has handed them, and for Colombians digging out from the earthquake who will meet Christ through a neighbor with a shovel.
Source: International Mission Board (global)
Heaven came down in the mud of Muncie
The storms started August 11. Torrential rain, damaging wind, and flooding that pushed some Indiana rivers to levels no one has seen in more than a hundred years. At least seven people died. Thousands of homes took water. In Muncie alone, in east central Indiana, roughly three hundred houses were damaged, many of them within walking distance of the church where North Carolina Baptists on Mission set up a recovery site this week. “Some teams will be able to walk to their jobs,” said disaster response coordinator Tom Beam.
Here is the part that gets me. These same North Carolina volunteers were just finishing weeks of mud out and tear out work in West Virginia after the late July floods there. Rather than going home, they redirected their equipment and their tired backs to Indiana. Baptist disaster relief teams from Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Oklahoma are coming alongside Indiana Baptists too. “We’re thankful for the opportunity to serve,” Beam said, “and for the dedicated volunteers and resources that allow us to respond to disasters wherever we’re needed. When we’re asked to serve, we want to be there and do all we can do to help in the name of Jesus.” When a family is standing in a ruined living room asking why God allows suffering, the first answer they usually get is not a sentence. It is a stranger in rubber boots carrying out the drywall.
Pray for the seven families in Indiana grieving a death, for homeowners facing months of rebuilding, and for the volunteers whose hands and knees are already worn out from West Virginia.
Source: Biblical Recorder (U.S.)
Heaven came down on a Tennessee campus
Every year a small handful of recent college graduates in Tennessee skip the normal post graduation path and spend ten months as campus missionaries with Baptist Collegiate Ministry. They have to be between twenty one and twenty six, active in a Southern Baptist church, and willing to raise their own support. This year three of them are Terry “TJ” Taylor and Trinity Sankey at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Leighanne Higgins at Vanderbilt. Taylor came out of the BCM at Austin Peay, where he “learned about the importance of living on mission wherever I go for the rest of my time on earth,” and he wants to be “a helping hand for college students who want to serve and glorify Him.” Sankey put it plainly: “I fell in love with pouring into college students and applied.” Higgins took the job without knowing exactly where it leads. “I didn’t know what the Lord was calling me to, but I feel a call to full time ministry.”
Ask them what students need most and none of them says programs. They say authentic community. Taylor remembers the pressure to pretend to be someone he was not, until the BCM at Austin Peay showed him his real interests could glorify God instead of being hidden to fit in. Sankey talks about being available and willing to push students in a healthy direction. Higgins, who battled it herself, names anxiety and hopelessness, imposter syndrome, distrust rooted in broken families, and the grind of trying to outperform everyone around you. “Life for Generation Z has become a competition against peers, and without hope, it makes this world seem rather bleak,” she said. Then she said the sentence that should stop every one of us. “My peers need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ to show them that this life isn’t pointless.” That is the whole assignment, and it starts with helping a nineteen year old understand who Jesus really is.
Pray for TJ, Trinity and Leighanne as the semester starts, for the students walking onto campus carrying more anxiety than anyone can see, and for the churches and donors funding three young adults who could be doing almost anything else.
Source: Baptist and Reflector (U.S.)
Four stories, one thread: God had already put the tool in someone’s hand before the need showed up. A Deaf missionary noticed that sign languages share a common root, years before anyone knew it could crack Bible translation wide open. A girl raised pigs in Oklahoma while a team in Colombia prayed for exactly her. A crew learned to gut a flooded house in West Virginia and then Indiana flooded. Three graduates sat in campus ministry rooms for four years and came out knowing precisely what a lonely freshman needs. Whatever ordinary competence you are sitting on right now, God has not wasted a minute of it. My free eBook Where Heaven Came Down gathers more of these stories, and you can find Make It Rain and Who Is Jesus here. Until next Saturday, keep watching for the places heaven comes down.