Wise Beyond Years

by on in Drew and Emily, Pictures · 1 Comment

Tree

A friend of ours has written a series of books on how husbands can pray for their wives, how wives can pray for their husbands, and how parents can pray for their children. Surprisingly, our friend is unmarried and has no kids. When we found out that he had authored these books, we couldn’t resist discussing the obvious: What’s a guy without a wife and kids doing writing on these subjects? Emily suggested they would be good to read as an outsider’s objective perspective looking in on things. (I guess my opinion isn’t objective enough for her.) I, being the pious one, suggested that Scripture can make you wise beyond your years, and then I backed that up with a few verses from Scripture:

The proverbs of Solomon…Their purpose is to teach wisdom and discipline…They make the naive mature, the young knowledgeable and discreet. (Proverbs 1:1-4 CEB)

Coming up with these two arguments in favor of our friend’s writings on our own, I thought I’d ask him about it. I can’t remember now exactly how I breached the subject, but rest assured that it was awkwardly and directly stated. “Hey, your books. But…you don’t have a wife and kids.” He’d had the question before. “Ah, yeh, it’s just Scripture that I turned into prayers for people to pray. I tweaked passages to make them easily pray-able.” Bravo.

Mine and Emily’s bewilderment and gut “What?” reaction to our friend’s books must be akin to how some of my colleagues feel. The average age of folks within our organization, I recently learned, is 52. That’s nearly twice my age. I’m convinced that some of them must look at me and think, “Well done for moving to Africa, but what of practical use to you have to offer?” Truth is age speaks louder than education. We find it difficult to look past who we perceive someone to be.

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Now, I don’t want to incite a pity party, but only to point out a perceived lack of respect, or perhaps better stated lack of full confidence, on the part of my older colleagues. And I readily add that when I’m their age I probably won’t respect kids my age either.

To understand, picture the scenario in which I regularly find myself at work. There I am, seated around a table with colleagues (including national translators), all of whom are my senior, and I’m asked to critique their work. A verse that the team has translated is read aloud and then I’m asked if I see any problems with it. Imagine if your job worked like this and you were critiqued in this way. Would you be receptive? I know I probably wouldn’t be. No wonder in his letter to Timothy after writing “Command and teach these things” did Paul add,

Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity. (1 Timothy 4:12 NIV)

I can demand respect from my kids, but I can’t from my co-workers and colleagues. I’ve got to win it. I’ve got to win it in all these ways that Paul mentions “in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.”

“How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young,
compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the
striving and  tolerant of the weak and strong.
Because someday in life you will have been all of these.”
–George Washington Carver

It’s not whether the people around us are wiser or share wisdom with us, it’s whether we’re listening–whether we have ears to hear that makes us wise beyond our years.

Of Making Many Books

by on in Drew and Emily · Add Comment

Alphabet

Emily will readily admit that she wishes she read more. Me, too. But I wish I read books more efficiently which in turn would mean, perhaps, that I read more. The problem I find is that as soon as I start reading one book, I hear about another that I instantly want to read as well. O how the reading heart wanders! I then have to bind my wandering heart like a fetter to the book I’m currently committed to. And the queue builds…waiting like an impatient credit card-carrying customer behind a precious daughter of many years writing a check at the checkout.

There is thus a certain discipline of reading that guides how we read as well as finishes one book before beginning another. If reading cultivates self-discipline as much as self-education, then it has done us a double service. We don’t after all just read books for the sake of saying we read them, do we?

Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.  –Ecclesiastes 12:12

Good but Unacceptable

by on in Drew and Emily · 1 Comment

This morning was the first meeting of a new Hebrew reading group that fellow colleagues and I started up. What was new for me was singing in Hebrew. Here are some audio clips from today: Psalm 133:1 and Lamentations 5:21.

We decided to read an Old Testament book that is usually one of the first to be translated. This whittled down the choice to three books: Genesis, Ruth and Jonah. I suggested that we go with the OT’s favorite Moabitess, Ruth. Who doesn’t enjoy a good love story?

After almost two hours of reading and discussing, we got to v.  6, which reads, “Then she [Naomi] arose along with her daughters-in-law to return from the field of Moab, because while in the territory of Moab she had heard that the Lord had paid attention to his people by providing food for them” (Ruth 1:6 CEB). My experienced colleagues–and when I say that, I mean colleagues who have been in Africa longer than I’ve been alive–they mentioned how the word “food” here can also be translated bread, but in this context it’s clearly referring to food in general. In the settings where they’ve worked, the local word for food usually conjures up the image of a cornmeal foufou ball. Here’s a picture of a ball of foufou that I had recently while out in a village. On its own it doesn’t have much flavor but dip it in a little sauce and it’ll fill you right up.

image

I asked my colleagues if one could say that Jesus is the foufou of life, still thinking about my Behold, the Chicken of God experience a couple of months back. The response I got back is one worth remembering:

You would have to ask the community. Good translations can be unacceptable. You cannot use key terms that the churches reject.

If we define a good translation as one that accurately represents the original meaning, then perhaps foufou of life would be a good translation for folks for whom foufou fills the same role (pun on bread “roll”!) as bread did in Jesus’ day. But if one such “good” translation were rejected by the Church as unacceptable, then it must be reconsidered.

Thus we see that the role of the community in Bible translation is huge.

In their book Translating the Bible into Action, Harriet and Margaret Hill share a great story that highlights the same point (p. 17):

While translation is underway, leaders from all the churches need to be involved in decisions about translating key biblical terms, such as Holy Spirit, grace, the cross, repentance, glory, eternal life, God, angels…

It may take a long time, much discussion, and careful study to reach agreement…  Often a compromise is the only solution. For example, in a large language in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Catholics and the Protestants had different terms for Holy Spirit. They knew they had to have one Bible for everyone to use, so they had to come to an agreement on the term used in the translation. After much discussion, their solution was to take the word for ‘holy’ from the Catholics and the word for ‘Spirit’ from the Protestants! Ten years later, no one remembered the original terms.