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.
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