Do you ever have moments when much like Saul with the scales (Acts 9) you feel like you are finally able to see something? And once you see that something, it seems so glaringly obvious?
Halfway into my India trip, I found myself in the northern state of Bihar to a place called Purnia. Incidentally and completely unrelated, a few firsts happened to me while I was there:
1. I lived at a girls’ orphanage
2. I got my first mosquito bite of the trip (which is actually not that small a feat as I’d been in India for 2 weeks already!)
3. I saw my first Indian tea plantation (each row of leaves was the same height which may not sound like much but when you see it, you can’t help but being awed by the sight and think about all the work that must go into growing tea)
4. I met a guy who went to medical school with my cousin, Thomas bhiaya
I think that was all my firsts in Purnia. Oh! Wait… I also spent some time in my first Indian police station.
But back to my story.
My presence in Purnia was solely for the purpose of chatting up all the people involved in a storying workshop being held there. What you ask is storying? Well, it’s a big part of the orality movement that is currently underway in ministry and encompasses taking the Bible orally to the world’s least reached people, in particular the non-literate population, in a culturally appropriate way. It’s actually an incredibly fascinating concept and project. If you want to learn more about it, check out http://www.onestory.org/Default.aspx.
But back to my story… I arrived in Purnia with the workshop well under way and into its final week. Now you might not know this about me but I do not speak a lick of Hindi. Well, it turned out that most of the mother tongue translators (MTTs) do not speak a lick of English. So communication with them wound up being mostly smiling and hearing their stories through interpretations (thanks Matthew and Sarosh!). I also met some of the foreigner missionaries (mostly US although there were some Australians as well) that led the seminar and work with the MTTs to put together the stories to share in their communities. Now, I was only there for a very short time but one thing became evident very quickly. Telling a Bible story? Not an easy task. In fact, it’s rather hard!
I think that might sound weird to people (I know before I got there I didn’t really think sharing stories from the Bible would be all that difficult) but imagine it like this. You are a believer but most of the other people in your language group, say less than 2%, have never even heard of Jesus. And you now have to share the Bible with them. Let’s not forget that you weren’t someone who grew up going to Sunday school and church but you came to know Jesus through a missionary who visited your village when you were 24. Oh yeah, and there’s no Bible in your language so even through Hindi isn’t your mother tongue, the only Bible available is in Hindu so you do your best. Now, think about telling the story of creation in an engaging interesting way to people who think of Jesus as a foreigner’s God.
I don’t know that I explained that well but I hope you can see how it can be an arduous process, albeit a labor of love (God’s love). Given that the scenario I painted isn’t so far off for many language groups in that part of India, putting together stories means the local MTTs need to share their traditional stories with the foreigners helping them, they then listen to Bible stories and then together craft Bible stories for their communities. Now, I have done a huge injustice in describing the process. I didn’t talk at all about story selection, culturally adapting stories, translating and back-translating the stories so they can be checked for Biblical accuracy, finding a theme to link the stories to the needs of a particular people group, creating songs, or the hundreds of other details and steps that go into this work. So…let me just apologize for that now and say that the workshop I was at was the third in a series and the whole process of crafting approximately 25 Bible stories started before July 2008 and is still underway today.
Most of the people, both foreigners and Indian nationals, started their days well before six o’clock and ended their days around ten o’clock. Mind you, it’s India so on top of all the work, you’re also constantly battling power outages, having to put up with electricity surges frying computer strips, trying to stretch every rupee to unrealistic levels to make it to the end of the project, and of course, trying to swat away the bugs, bugs and more bugs that are everywhere (my room had termites and boy, are they loud. Who knew?).
In spite of that, after spending only a few days I could see why they all did it. When MTTs are trained to tell stories, they are also trained on engaging the people in the story. One of the MTTs was telling the story of creation to a group of rural, more than likely illiterate people in Angika, one of the languages of the region. When he reached the part about the creation of Eve, one of the women went very still and when question time came, she jumped up and demanded that he share that part again. I think the translator repeated himself a few times until the woman sat down, a look of profound joy and awe upon her face. Afterwards, she stopped to talk to him, asking him to confirm that she had understood what he had shared. He assured her she had. She got so excited. You see, she didn’t realize that she was created to be a helpmate for her husband. She didn’t realize that her birth wasn’t an accident. She never knew that, in spite of what she had been raised to believe, she had value in her family. She mattered. And even though she had heard the story before in Hindi, hearing it in her mother tongue, she understood it for the first time. She realized that God wasn’t a far off God or a statue sitting in her father’s house, but He is her personal God. She understood that He is her father and just like Eve, she too was created with a purpose and out of the incredible love our Creator God has for each of His children.
My fish scale moment. I know that God created me for a purpose. But how often do I get excited about it? I have at least four Bibles in my room in Florida and even more in New Jersey; I've heard Bible stories my whole life. How often do I read it? When was the last time I simply listened to a Bible story without needing amazing sound effects or graphics to make it interesting to me? How often do I thank God that I am so blessed that I can read His Word in a language that I am 100% comfortable with - my heart language?. I’ve heard the story of creation hundreds of time. When was the last time I stopped to recognize my place in it?
I take God’s Word for granted. The thought of not having access to it never crosses my mind. The thought of not being able to hear sermons, read a Bible, or the thousands of Christian books in English are alien concepts to me. My mind can’t even fathom such a reality.
Halfway into my India trip, I found myself in the northern state of Bihar to a place called Purnia. Incidentally and completely unrelated, a few firsts happened to me while I was there:
1. I lived at a girls’ orphanage
2. I got my first mosquito bite of the trip (which is actually not that small a feat as I’d been in India for 2 weeks already!)
3. I saw my first Indian tea plantation (each row of leaves was the same height which may not sound like much but when you see it, you can’t help but being awed by the sight and think about all the work that must go into growing tea)
4. I met a guy who went to medical school with my cousin, Thomas bhiaya
I think that was all my firsts in Purnia. Oh! Wait… I also spent some time in my first Indian police station.
But back to my story.
My presence in Purnia was solely for the purpose of chatting up all the people involved in a storying workshop being held there. What you ask is storying? Well, it’s a big part of the orality movement that is currently underway in ministry and encompasses taking the Bible orally to the world’s least reached people, in particular the non-literate population, in a culturally appropriate way. It’s actually an incredibly fascinating concept and project. If you want to learn more about it, check out http://www.onestory.org/Default.aspx.
But back to my story… I arrived in Purnia with the workshop well under way and into its final week. Now you might not know this about me but I do not speak a lick of Hindi. Well, it turned out that most of the mother tongue translators (MTTs) do not speak a lick of English. So communication with them wound up being mostly smiling and hearing their stories through interpretations (thanks Matthew and Sarosh!). I also met some of the foreigner missionaries (mostly US although there were some Australians as well) that led the seminar and work with the MTTs to put together the stories to share in their communities. Now, I was only there for a very short time but one thing became evident very quickly. Telling a Bible story? Not an easy task. In fact, it’s rather hard!
I think that might sound weird to people (I know before I got there I didn’t really think sharing stories from the Bible would be all that difficult) but imagine it like this. You are a believer but most of the other people in your language group, say less than 2%, have never even heard of Jesus. And you now have to share the Bible with them. Let’s not forget that you weren’t someone who grew up going to Sunday school and church but you came to know Jesus through a missionary who visited your village when you were 24. Oh yeah, and there’s no Bible in your language so even through Hindi isn’t your mother tongue, the only Bible available is in Hindu so you do your best. Now, think about telling the story of creation in an engaging interesting way to people who think of Jesus as a foreigner’s God.
I don’t know that I explained that well but I hope you can see how it can be an arduous process, albeit a labor of love (God’s love). Given that the scenario I painted isn’t so far off for many language groups in that part of India, putting together stories means the local MTTs need to share their traditional stories with the foreigners helping them, they then listen to Bible stories and then together craft Bible stories for their communities. Now, I have done a huge injustice in describing the process. I didn’t talk at all about story selection, culturally adapting stories, translating and back-translating the stories so they can be checked for Biblical accuracy, finding a theme to link the stories to the needs of a particular people group, creating songs, or the hundreds of other details and steps that go into this work. So…let me just apologize for that now and say that the workshop I was at was the third in a series and the whole process of crafting approximately 25 Bible stories started before July 2008 and is still underway today.
Most of the people, both foreigners and Indian nationals, started their days well before six o’clock and ended their days around ten o’clock. Mind you, it’s India so on top of all the work, you’re also constantly battling power outages, having to put up with electricity surges frying computer strips, trying to stretch every rupee to unrealistic levels to make it to the end of the project, and of course, trying to swat away the bugs, bugs and more bugs that are everywhere (my room had termites and boy, are they loud. Who knew?).
In spite of that, after spending only a few days I could see why they all did it. When MTTs are trained to tell stories, they are also trained on engaging the people in the story. One of the MTTs was telling the story of creation to a group of rural, more than likely illiterate people in Angika, one of the languages of the region. When he reached the part about the creation of Eve, one of the women went very still and when question time came, she jumped up and demanded that he share that part again. I think the translator repeated himself a few times until the woman sat down, a look of profound joy and awe upon her face. Afterwards, she stopped to talk to him, asking him to confirm that she had understood what he had shared. He assured her she had. She got so excited. You see, she didn’t realize that she was created to be a helpmate for her husband. She didn’t realize that her birth wasn’t an accident. She never knew that, in spite of what she had been raised to believe, she had value in her family. She mattered. And even though she had heard the story before in Hindi, hearing it in her mother tongue, she understood it for the first time. She realized that God wasn’t a far off God or a statue sitting in her father’s house, but He is her personal God. She understood that He is her father and just like Eve, she too was created with a purpose and out of the incredible love our Creator God has for each of His children.
My fish scale moment. I know that God created me for a purpose. But how often do I get excited about it? I have at least four Bibles in my room in Florida and even more in New Jersey; I've heard Bible stories my whole life. How often do I read it? When was the last time I simply listened to a Bible story without needing amazing sound effects or graphics to make it interesting to me? How often do I thank God that I am so blessed that I can read His Word in a language that I am 100% comfortable with - my heart language?. I’ve heard the story of creation hundreds of time. When was the last time I stopped to recognize my place in it?
I take God’s Word for granted. The thought of not having access to it never crosses my mind. The thought of not being able to hear sermons, read a Bible, or the thousands of Christian books in English are alien concepts to me. My mind can’t even fathom such a reality.
And yet experiencing this woman’s joy made me realize how precious all these things are.
There are millions of people in the world who do not have a Bible or have ever heard about Jesus in their heart language. What do you think about that? And perhaps more importantly, what are we going to do about that?
There are millions of people in the world who do not have a Bible or have ever heard about Jesus in their heart language. What do you think about that? And perhaps more importantly, what are we going to do about that?
2 comments:
It a reality many Christians take for granted, including myself. Makes us realize how blessed we really are but simply don't recognize those blessings! Love the blog! May God continue to guide you through your travels......Love you and miss you more than words can describe :)
Love this thought:
"I’ve heard the story of creation hundreds of time. When was the last time I stopped to recognize my place in it?"
so true, so true!!
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