A Plethora of Papaya

We need your help! The Catholic sister's compound on which we live is also the home to some three dozen papaya trees, all of which right now are bearing the weight of a bountiful papaya harvest. That means with 35+ trees, each holding 20-30 papayas, we are under attack with the threat of as many as 1,000 fruity bombs looming over our heads. And despite a steady diet of papaya for breakfast, and papaya smoothies for snack, and papaya popsicles in the afternoon heat, we are not keeping up with the harvest. So calling all papaya lovers, we need your help!

 

The Truth Be Told

I never realized that sending Christmas greetings could be so fun! In the end, it isn't much, a picture of our family with less than a dozen words of well wishing, but it’s the opportunity for creativity that gets my wheels spinning. Especially in this age of photoshop-ed masterpieces, the skies are the limit as to what absurd posses I can place my family in, and all, none-the-less with perfect smiles.

So yes, mom, the truth be told, our Christmas Greetings sent this year, was in fact a farce as usual. But, your straight-faced email did get Andrea's goat, when after reading:

“We got your Christmas card.  Actually, Derek (that is, my older brother) got his before we did, so we saw it there over the weekend first.  We got ours just yesterday.  So darn cute!!!!!!!  Very creative!!!   And good pictures of everyone.  Derek thought you photo shopped it, but it is obvious that it is the real thing.  We were very impressed with how strong Lumi has gotten.  Nice that you got to revisit Kili again too.”

...she said to me, “I can't tell if you mom is joking or serious.” Hee hee…good one!

No the photo was not taken in Tanzania, instead we built our “mountain” on the nice green grass of our good friend's backyard lawn.

And no, Lumi is not the world's strongest and most well balanced 9-month-old baby, rather her flawless pose was achieved with a little bit of help.

And of course, Lumi's proclamation of Jesus' birth, wouldn't quite have the force it needed without a clenched fist to drive home her point. So we simply lopped off her original hand an replaced with with another. 

Getting her on top of the mountain was no balancing act, indeed. Rather just a simple cut and paste.

 Then I didn't feel like the banana trees in the background would complement the idea of summiting a mountain, so, removing the backdrop…

I brought Kilimanjaro right into Addis Ababa, Ethiopia!

Lastly, adding our message and walah, we head to the printers.

For those of you who received it, we hope you enjoyed our Christmas card again this year. We appreciate your love and support! For those who aren't on our Christmas card list but would like to be, just shoot me an email and we'll add you for next year.

2014 - The Sweetness of God's Love

2013 - Birthday Party for Jesus

2012 - Family Pic - (Where's Waldo Style)

2011 - Rudolf Competition

2010 - Unto Us A Son Is Given

A Timely Dose of Secomaidezole Corinthacilin

As mentioned in the previous post, our two months in Addis Ababa left my heart feeling quite detached from the passion and joy I know I ought to have working day in and day out deep in God's Word. And while the recording of Luke and Acts was a brush with this joy during an otherwise 7 weeks of battling discouragement - Consultant checks, administrative headaches, truck problems, and others - we looked forward to hitting a restart button with our move back down-country among the  Gmz.

 

But not so fast, the day before our departure, while enjoying lunch with a friend at a restaurant, someone decided that their heavy duty wire cutters entitled them to "borrow" the spare tire we had locked underneath the truck. Grr… We have a second spare tire at our down-country home, but we'd have to drive the 11-hour journey without it, which is not recommended in a country whose gravel seems to have a 6-to-1 ratio of stones to nails! Do we delay our plans? Nah, tired of Addis, we decided to go for it.

 

Along the way in our newly fixed truck, we weren't very thrilled when we hit a bump and the engine cut. Turns out the negative battery lead jumped off the terminal - Apparently the mechanic had cleaned and scrubbed the battery terminals to the point that the clamps, though tightened all the way, no longer grip the terminals anymore...GRRR. Thankfully, it was an easy road-side fix allowing us to continue on our way, but now, likely as a result of the jolt to the engine, we have an electrical problem with our glow plug switch. Not exactly the breath of fresh air my already struggling attitude needed.

 

My symptoms? Well, there was the elevated temperature of negativity, sensitivity to annoyance, mild anxiety, with frequent spells of bad attitude, especially in the evenings. I went and saw the “Great Physician” and it seems he has since prescribed just the exact medicine I needed: Secomaidezole Corinthacilin, more commonly known on the street as Second Corinthians.

 

But, when the dust finally settled in our Gilgel home and I was able to return to the office with the translators, God's grace was renewed each morning by a truly refreshing look into his Word. Whereas the end of the translation process (the consultant check) is the most wearing on my passion, the first step (drafting new texts) is by far the most exciting! I get to look at these texts of Scripture for the first time through Gmz eyes! But, even more than that, we were drafting some of my favorite texts from one of my favorite books of the Bible. 2 Corinthians is the book where Paul bears his soul most openly: the hurt he feels at the Corinthians showing some measure of allegiance to false apostles who puff themselves up and peddle the Word of God for money; his enduring love he has for the Corinthians despite the conflict; a strong yet humble defense of his apostleship; and the foolishness of boasting in anything other than Christ. My hermeneutics class at Moody, focused entirely on unpacking this letter, helped me see the power of understanding Scripture in light of its historical context, and in doing so, drove this book, in particular, deep into my heart!

 

And now, 15 years later, in an office some 7,500 miles away, I have the privilege of re-experiencing Paul's heart with our Gmz friends and co-workers: Being led in Christ's triumphal procession, being the aroma of Christ, God's shocking grace shown in placing the treasure of the gospel in mere jars of clay, the anticipation of the judgment seat (bema) of Christ, and high calling as ambassadors of Christ to hold out the message of reconciliation, and on and on… There is so much gold to be panned out of this letter, it is my prayer that our translation has done it justice, and that the Holy Spirit equips the minds and hearts of Gmz pastors and evangelists to grasp and share its great wealth.

 

Fighting a Heart Detached

I'm having to remind myself that I have the best job ever. I get to live and work in God's Word day after day, studying, learning and experiencing the texts of Scripture afresh along with three colleagues who are hearing much of it for the first time! However, sadly, I have to keep reminding myself of this because without fail, a couple times a year, my heart manages to lose perspective. Honestly, there is never any lack of discouraging factors involved in the Bible translation, upon which if I choose to focus, quickly take the wind out of my sails. It may be interpersonal conflict between team members, it may be competing priorities which disrupt an already tightly-packed schedule, it may be heated translation arguments over what I view as non-issues (the minute pronunciation of a word), or it may be an insistence upon conformity to the old King James-ish version in Amharic, despite all modern scholarship pointing in a different direction. It could be anything, really, that causes my heart to detach, and often it is hard to pin-point just one trigger.

So it was during the 7 week stay we had in Addis Ababa from early October to mid November, more than half of which found the Gmz team and I shielding ourselves from the bombardment of questions from consultants as we checked Mark, James, 1 Corinthians, 1&2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. Consultant checks are always hard for me. It's humbling to have someone point out mistakes we've made and have to wrestle with making changes on the spot. It's frustrating to see how much of our time with the consultant is spent trying to convince him/her of something about the Gmz language and culture which warrants the translation we had chosen and it’s frustrating to see, given how little he/she knows of the Gmz language and culture, how powerless he/she is to offer helpful suggestions. It's scary to see heated arguments get opened up again just as their wounds are starting to heal from our last check. And it's disappointing when either the consultant takes a stand much too strong, forcing a change that my eyes see as for the worse (ie. ‘remaining possessions’ instead of ‘excess wealth’ in Luke 21:4) or he/she takes too light of a stand and approves a translation that I strongly advise against (ie. the creation narrative stating that we were made is God's physical, bodily image). All of this leads me to a proper understanding of my role, that of an advisor, not a final decision-maker.

In having lunch with a colleague late in those 7 weeks and venting about all of this, he asked me, “What does all of this do to your passion toward the work? Does it make you want to dig in more? Or to disengage?” Sadly, it's much more often the later. But not exclusively. In those challenging weeks, God did not leave me without moments of real joy, one of which shines in my memory above the rest.

It occurred on a Friday and Saturday at the end of my busiest week in months. While I had been planning and leading the Executive Committee and a couple of Director handover events, the Gmz guys had been in the sound booth recording our texts of Luke and Acts for oral publication. As I was able, I poked  my head in to hear the reports, which sadly were not all positive. Heated arguments over pronunciation, low reading ability, stuttering, all of which was putting the pace behind schedule. Finally, Friday afternoon and all-day Saturday, I was able to add my efforts to the equation in the hopes of finishing our goals. As I read each phrase out loud, Worku spoke them into the microphone, Thomas listened and read along for accuracy, while Janey sat in another room reviewing the previous session's work. We were running through chapters as fast as we could, and yet two thoughts struck me deep down: the first was somewhere along the lines of “This is it. This recording is the form of publication that the Gmz people are going to access. The extremely low literacy rate make oral distribution a much better means than written and so here we were putting the metaphorical ink of sound bytes down on the invisible paper of electronic files. It’s the final watering of the seed we hope to see spring to life in the Gmz church.” 

The second thought I had was more personal. Sure, I had read these passages of Acts many, many times before. The Gmz guys and I had gone through each verse no less than 8 times in the last two years. And yet, to hear my own voice read them out loud, phrase by phrase, and then to hear Worku speak it with clarity and passion, they hit me at a new level. Peter's vision of unclean animals revealing God's acceptance of all people, both Jews and Gentiles – God's choice of Saul to become Paul and Ananias' faithfulness and trust to be a part of that conversion process – Paul's hardship wherever he turned and yet his unwavering faith which even steered the ship and its crew through a very real life-and-death situation. The book of Acts really is a special book, unlike any other as it records the narrative of how Christ, through the Holy Spirit, led and spread the infant church during those challenging, yet triumphant early years! It’s a testimony of which we ought never grow tired.