Just a Month?

 Still no vacation pictures—maybe next week. Hope it doesn’t take a month to get them developed.

Speaking of a month, I seem to be somewhat preoccupied with the idea of time recently. I’m sure it’s partly because my husband was diagnosed with lung cancer at the end of spring, but for whatever reason, I will pose this question to you readers.

What would you do if you knew you had only one month to live? 

There are all sorts of answers that could range from “party hearty” to travel to exotic climes to spend quality time with family.

Have you ever met someone who’s favorite day is Someday? (That’s not original—I got it from a book.)  I must admit Someday has been my favorite day at various times in my life. However, by the time you get to be my age, you really begin to realize that Someday had better change to a specific day if you have a goal you are wanting to attain.  After all, I may enjoy 15 more Christmas celebrations—or I may not. The number is beginning to feel finite although it was all along.

Since none of us know how many days (or perhaps hours or minutes) we have left on this earth to accomplish what God put us here for in the first place, may we all get rid of the idea of Someday.

How would living your life for the next ten years look if you lived it as if you knew your expiration date was at the end of this month? Maybe it wouldn’t look  any different than you live now. I know I would not be on this crazy diet if I only had one month left! But since I may well live on to further battle the bulges, I will continue the diet.  I do know I will be more selective about my TV watching, and be looking for all the opportunities I can find to be with my husband.

Of course, the most important thing about pondering only one month left to live is what happens when you die. We have two choices—we can choose to accept Christ’s offer of forgiveness and salvation and go to the heavenly home we were created for or we can choose our own way, all the way to the isolation, torment and whatever else hell has to offer.

Back to my favorite verse about the gift of life/time found in Psalm 90:12:”Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

Just One Vowel

I know. This is a strange way to start a blog when I’ve been away for two weeks. 

Unfortunately, when we arrived at the outskirts of Salt Lake City, I realized I had forgotten my digital camera so had to buy a couple of disposables. Those pictures are not yet developed so no pictures of anything at this point. That’s one reason for the strange blog title.

When we returned from our travels, I started going through a large collection of e-mails

One of the messages was a newsletter from friends connected with Wycliffe Bible Translators who also attached a wonderful story from the Wycliffe USA President. Here is the gist of the account.

A translator working with the Cameroonian people was trying to find a way to translate God’s love in a meaningful fashion. He phrased it as looking for God’s footprint  in the history or daily life of this language group, the Hdi. The Wycliffe translator, Lee, felt sure that God had left a clue “to let these people know Who He was and that He wanted to relate to them”.

In a dream God prompted Lee to look at the verb for the word, love. He knew that almost all Hdi verbs ended in the vowels a, i, and u. For some reason, though the verb, love, only used a and i. Why didn’t they use u?

Lee met with the Hdi community elders who were his translating committee. He asked them, “Could you ‘dvi’ your wife?” “Yes,” they answered.  “That would mean she had been loved but the love was gone.”

“Could you ‘dva’ your wife?” “Yes, they answered. “That kind of love depended on the wife’s actions. She would be loved as long as she remained faithful and cared for her husband well.”

“Could you ‘dvu’ your wife?”  The elders laughed. “Of course not! If you said that, you would have to keep loving your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water, never  made your meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would be compelled to love her. No, we would never say ‘dvu’. It just doesn’t exist.”

They sat quietly for a moment. Then Lee, thinking of John 3:16 asked, “Could God ‘dvu’ people?”

There was an even longer silence and then tears started to roll down the weathered cheeks of the elders.  They said, “Do you know what this would mean? It would mean that God kept loving us over and over, millennia after millennia, while all that time we kept rejecting His great love. He is compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people.”

With one vowel, the meaning was changed from God saying, “I love you because of what you do and who you are” to “I love you because of Who I am.  I love you because of Me and not because of you.”

God had encoded the story of His unconditional love into the Hdi language. For centuries the little word was there—unused but available and quite understandable. When that meaning of the word, love, was finally spoken, it called into question the entire Hdi belief system. 

If God was not a mean and scary spirit, did they need ancestors’ spirits to intercede for them or did they need sorcery to relate to the spirits? Many Hdi said “no” to the old bondage of spirits and “yes” to God’s unconditional love

God ‘dvu-d’ us enough to sacrifice his unique Son for us, so that our relationship with Him can be ordered and oriented correctly which means that relationship does not depend on us keeping rules a certain way, etc.  It’s not about us, it’s all about Him..The cross changes everything.

This is such an awesome story I just had to share it with my friends. One little vowel and it makes a world of difference—or should I say, an eternity of difference!