Why I Will Never Be A Translator

I've hit upon a marvelously introverted way to learn the local language. I found the translation of the New Testament online and I'm doing a [very poor] back-translation into English. I have to look up most of the nouns in each sentence but that's okay, I learn vocabulary that way. After I have all of the words in the sentence translated I try to shape them into some kind of sensible order- not always easy because the local grammar is very different from English. Once I have some sort of a sentence formed, I compare it to the ESV to see how close I got.

Recently I was in Matthew chapter 2. When I got to verse 11, I kind of got confused. This is what I had:

"They entered the house, they saw the child and Mary his mother, they stopped and knelt, they worshiped him. They opened their boxes of possessions, [and] give him gold and incense and ____ which smelled good and which made them talk dizzily."

That third gift must have been something pretty strong! Finally I realized the problem. The last word is "miir," which means "to be dizzy." It is pronounced a bit like MIR, the old Russian space station. But after saying it to myself a few times and playing with the vowel sounds, I suddenly heard "myrrh." Aha! So it was something that smelled good and which they called "myrrh".

So there you have it, folks. No hallucinogenic presents were present at the first Christmas after all.

In Season and Out of Season

One Sunday my wife and I passed a neighbor's house on our way home from church. One of their daughters was standing outside their house doing laundry so we greeted her. Part of the normal series of greetings is asking where the person is coming from (people are nosy!) so she asked us and we replied that we were coming from church.

"What did you learn at church today?" she asked.

We'd never had anybody ask us that. We never dreamed that anybody would. It took us a second or two to respond. I quickly scoured my brain for the most hard-hitting bit of theology I could think of while my wife started off with, "We learned the importance of faith."

I jumped in, almost a bit embarrassed because it was so black-and-white, with, "We learned that if you pray in the name of Jesus, even the miraculous is possible."

"Really?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "Because Jesus is powerful."

She pondered that for a moment and then we finished our standard greetings and walked off. I really wish I had known what to say next. I think she would have been interested in hearing more but I wasn't sure what to say. Of course as soon as we got home, I realized what I should have done. Many lessons here are taught by stories. The sermon had been full of stories, most of them taken directly from the Bible. The most natural thing in the world would have been to start telling her about the crippled woman in the synagogue, the demon-possessed boy, Lazarus...

My background looks for the hard-and-fast theology that will convince a person once and for all. That doesn't work here. But more importantly, I just wasn't ready to be asked. It seems I expect to spend lots of time and thought and prayer preparing to share my faith with somebody. As I watch my local friends boldly sharing their faith I realize that I need to move past deliberation and just do it. That's the only way it will eventually become natural.

Still Blogging...

Greetings, weary web wanderer!

I know you had once believed my blog to be beleaguered by irreparable... something. Something that starts with a B and makes everything stop working.

But no, it lives on! Thank you for coming back to this once-frequented patch of cyber-forest to relax in the shade of my overly-verbose ponderings.

Why, you ask, am I suddenly writing so many blogs? I think it is pre-paternal angst. Let's stick with that theory for the moment. If I suddenly stop blogging again in a few months, you'll know why. But don't worry, I'll be back again some day!