Why the pictures aren't up.

Patience, my faithful reader. I am giving a short little devotional in class tomorrow and it took me three hours at least to write it out. Fortunately one of my French friends (my only French friend?) agreed to fix all of my mistakes for me, so now it should be all correct. Of course, when I read it off the script tomorrow I will miss-pronounce half of it anyway, but at least I'm starting with proper French. I am planning to videotape the spectacle tomorow so you can witness it as well.

I am actually stealing a story told by B. Lukes several Sundays ago back home. I loved that story, despite the fact that I'm not married, so when I suddenly volunteered last week to share a devotional, this was the first thing that popped into my head. I tossed a couple other ideas around, but all of the normal things I would teach on are much to abstract for my current level of French. I didn't really want to just tell a Bible story in French. This story makes a fantastic point but yet is fairly simple to tell- or so I thought.

I was surprised how hard it was to tell a story in French. Fortunately we learned how to write future tenses in class today, and I learned past tense by reading another class's white board during coffee break. I ended up needing past, present, and future tense for the story. Even so, my sentence structure was all off. There was one big chunk of text (the part at the end where I am addressing the audience, of course) that my friend got to and just kind of stalled out. He told me that he would have to completely rewrite a bunch of the sentences for it to sound French, or he could just fix it enough that it would sound like a translation from English done by a computer. Since it was quite late, I just told him to scrap the whole middle section and leave the key lines at the beginning and end.

Honestly, nobody in my class would have caught a word I said of the other stuff anyway. All throughout the story I was digging through the dictionary for words, which doesn't bode well for my poor audience of newbies. Tomorrow will be a lot of pantomime and pictures... which should be a wonderful test of my artistic abilities.

Which means that I should get a little sleep. But first, my friend Robert put this up on Facebook. This was us, in downtown Paris, looking like tourists. And, just like tourists, we were lost and didn't even know it. Traveling at mid day with no compass can be really difficult. I thought at first I was on the south side of the river, but none of the roads were on the map... until I turned it upside down. MAGIC!!!