Journeyman

I was right yesterday when I said that the bunch of people taking the WoW course were nice, they are. What I wasn’t completely prepared for were the sheer number of analytical type people that are interested in this kind of work.

I’m not analytical, at least, not in this way. Many of these guys like patterns and structures and systems… my kind of analysis is based around the simple phrase, “what the hell happened there?” usually as I get myself out of one scrape and try to avoid landing in the same situation in the future.

I’ll use this space as some kind of reflection, feel free to ignore, I’m kind of writing for myself here.

This morning – I’ve burnt the roof of my mouth at some point because drinking coffee this morning hurt. It wasn’t a distraction so much as an annoyance. I was feeling bad too, because I came into the morning session drinking steaming black filtered coffee while everyone else had to make to with the sachet type stuff you get in hotel rooms. Part of me thought I should leave it in my flat, but then I need coffee to function before 11am so figured that I’d have to be allowed this luxury.

Morning worship was lead by Eddie. He still hasn’t shaken off whatever bug he’s been carrying. His voice was not good but his words were useful – he was speaking about God being a relational being who is interested in us as individuals. At least, that’s what I was still thinking about at the end of the day, it was good to muse on too.

We then had Mark talking about language surveys and giving examples of his time in Tanzania. A few stats for you,

• There are 6,912 languages
• 438 have complete Bibles
• 1,168 have the New Testament
• 848 have some portion of the Bible.
• There are still some 200 million people who do not have access to the Bible.

Language surveys are the first step as people try to find out the language situation in a community. Details like, how many people speak the language, are there similar language groups, is this a written or oral language… details like that.

It was interesting and Mark did a good job of presenting the nature of language surveys. Personally I realised that this kind of thing doesn’t excite me as much as other people. Some folk reflected at the end of the day that they could see themselves doing something like this, I instead thought how the presentation could have been improved. Ah well, God loves our differences.

We went on a bit of a treasure hunt later and answered some questions relating to what we would do in certain situations.

“You arrive in a village hot and tired after a long trip. You are offered a drink of water, what do you do?”

a) pray and then drink it.

b) pretend to drink it

c) refuse and drink your own water

I was amazed that some people would go for (a). There would have to be a real special reason for me to have to drink the water. I clashed with a few people over that choice, and again later on when we were asked if we would meet the tribe’s chief in the house used for spirit worship. I said yes, others were less sure. I was working on the baisis that ‘my triune God trumps your spirits’.

As it turned out that there was no right or wrong answers.

The afternoon was centred on Scripture Use. In other words translating the Bible is no good if you give it to people who will not use it. Fair point, and something I found far more interesting.

So we discussed how we would work at encouraging a language group in PNG to engage with the Bible and see its relevence in society. Fortunately we didn’t just stick to reading nice passages of scripture that tell people not to worry and trust in God and everything will be OK.

It was a good day. I even managed to record a few interviews with people on the course for use when I get back to the day job.

Anyway, I’m now going to get on with reading some stuff and listening to the cricket on the radio. I really must join a gym soon these lazy evenings are doing me no good.