It’s good to make plans and I, for one, really enjoy the planning process. Whether it’s in a little book we carry around with us, charted on a white board, written on a calendar, scribbled on a scrap of paper or hidden away in an organized mind, plans help us know what to expect, allowing us to make decisions today informed by what we anticipate tomorrow.
In mid-December, I sat down and sketched out a plan for the time after our return to Ethiopia and as I did, I was very disappointed by something I was seeing: our first six months in the country were packed full of meetings, trainings and conferences in Addis Ababa. A 1-week Executive Council meeting in February, 3-week Hortatory Discourse Workshop in March, 1.5-week Branch Conference in April and then our first consultant check on Luke’s Gospel in early May. It was this last one that most concerned me as I asked myself, “We have a lot of work ahead of us in bringing our currently very rough draft of Luke to the well-polished form required of a consultant check, how is that possible when our time is broken up by all these other things! I counted the number of weeks I could be physically present with the team in exegetical checking and came up with only nine! Nine weeks to check 24 chapters, over 1000 verses? Not possible by my calculations. But wait, it isn’t really a full nine weeks because two weeks before meeting with the consultant we need to submit to him our final draft, word-for-word “back-translated” into Amharic or English. So nine weeks quickly becomes seven, not to mention the time it takes to back-translate.
My planning in December was already telling me, “Travis, don’t shoot for the whole book of Luke, bite off a smaller chunk.” Ok. At this stage in the project, checking 80-100 verses a week is a realistic goal. So 7 weeks could possibly be used to check 600 verses or roughly chapters 1-12. Given half the time, we can justify finishing half the book. Disappointing, but not bad. We will roll with the punches.
And so we rolled by lowering our expectations, but the punches didn’t stop there. Upon returning to Ethiopia, we wanted get out to Gesas as soon as possible in order to make use of every possible week. Yet, the night of our arrival, Micah came down with a fever, the first of five days of on-and-off fever. Unwilling to leave Addis with Micah running a temp, we delayed our move down-country nearly a week, turning one of my anticipated translation work weeks into merely one afternoon stop, greet, and hear a report from the team on all that had happened in our absence. Down to 6 weeks. Maybe only chapters 1-10 could now be consultant checked.
The next week we started checking with passion and things were going well. The first half of the week, we checked 45 verses and I was excited that we would meet the 80-100 verse goal right from the get go. But little did I know, the second half of our work week would be interrupted by a national holiday (determined by the shape of the moon and never announced until the night before). A few days gone and we’re down to 5.5 weeks. More like chapters 1-9.
Week 2, I returned Monday morning to work with the team, ready to make up for lost time. Just before launching into the text, “Uh, Travis, we tried to call you over the weekend, but the phone network was down, two of us have to attend classes all week this week. It is part of our university program.” Oh, believe me, I lost it inside and my frustration was on the tip of my tongue spilling out with each word I spoke. I won’t entertain you with a translation of everything I said, but it all came down to another week gone. Down to 4.5 weeks, maybe we should shoot for chapters 1-7.
Missing work meant that these two would have to work on five Saturdays to make up for the extra time off, so when I got a call Friday morning saying “Travis we are done with our school for the week, can you and Work’u come to work today (Friday) and tomorrow (Saturday)? “Yes!” I jumped at the chance and called Work’u immediately. “No!” I was told, “I can’t go today.” You see Work’u and I had struck a deal that he would have Wednesday-Friday off to build his new house (his whole village is in the process of moving and he is the very last one to build his house). He in turn would work those extra Saturdays with us so that we could do team checking. Work’u needed Friday to finish building his house. Grrr… Another possible work day gone, as our schedules seem to conflict in every possible way.
Work’u and I made the 30-mile motorbike ride up to the translation office on Saturday morning, ready to finally get a full day of team checking in. And we did, finishing verses 46-66 still in the first chapter of Luke!
Shortly before the work on that Saturday ended, I received a call from one of my bosses in the capital city, “Travis we need to schedule some trainings and, for budget reasons, we need to do it this month (February).” By this point, all I could do was laugh inside. The calendar says I should have had 13 weeks from our arrival to when our back-translated text was due in the hand of our consultant. That should have been enough time to check all 24 chapters of Luke. However, fourteen weeks had turned into seven due to the onslaught of mandatory meetings. Seven weeks then quickly became four and a half working weeks after Micah’s sickness, the surprise holiday, and the schooling. Now, even those 4.5 weeks would be up in the air as the budget demands otherwise.
Riding my motorbike back home last Saturday evening, a question kept resurfacing in my mind. It was a question asked during a Q &A time at one of our very supportive churches. “Why did it take three years to get the translation project started?” It was a VERY valid question, and unfortunately I felt like I did a poor job of answering it on the spot. After the presentation, however, a person well-seasoned in international ministry approached me and smiled knowingly, “Why did it take three years? Sometimes it just does. Yet we do our best, working hard with whatever time we are given.” If God wants the stars to align, he can make that happen with no effort at all. Why should I doubt that he do the same with our schedules when He so desires? And when he does, we ought not forget to thank him for it.
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