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!
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