Humming Hymns

Had dinner this evening at the Mekong Center. Pot-luck on the open fourth floor. Pad Thai - fried noodles, egg, tofu. Culturally comparable, I think, to the hamburger in America. Every restaurant offers it.

The Center hosts the pot-luck dinner every Thursday on the fourth floor for those staying in their rooms and those missionaries living in the city. It precedes the Thursday prayer meeting that lasts from 6:30 to 8:00. I sat with three parents of high school students with whom I worked last week at Reunion and a lovely gray-haired English lady. We talked of New Testament Greek and the tragedy in Myanmar.

Following dinner I helped wash dishes and clean up with the German mother of a girl who was in my small group last week. I hummed a song by The Innocence Mission until she started humming a hymn. I forget the name of it, but we hummed it together once she started.

Then to the prayer meeting. A group of eight of us in a circle of blue plastic chairs: two teachers from a theological seminary in the city, four missionaries, one Bible translator, and me. We sang hymns acapella from a white paper hymnal before reflecting on the tragedies that have wrecked Asia in the past few days. Then we prayed specifically for Myanmar, for the approval of visas to aid workers, for the safety of those we know serving God there, for softening of the hearts of the Burmese government and people. And then for China. And then for the prayer requests offered by those in the group. The focus on a community of prayer and Christian union and support modeled for the first time for me an example of what I've been hearing called a "home church," a gathering of Christians not within stained-glass-windowed walls but at the homes of close and like-minded friends. I hope to start something akin to this next semester at college. It showed me that "church" doesn't have to be a production and really can be more intimate with God and soul-searching when it is small and led by those who aren't 'church professionals.' We pleaded for God to move in Myanmar. It reminded me of Abraham pleading with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if only ten righteous men were found living there.

Afterward I sat in an empty conference room with a married German young man who, already having earned his masters in divinity in Germany, finished his masters in linguistics just recently in Thailand and now works translating the Bible into a dialect of the Laos language for a people group of 500,000. The people group hasn't a translation of the Bible in their native tongue. They are without the Gospels. My friend sits with the original Hebrew and Greek texts and a Laos man who speaks the dialect of the people group and translates. He said maybe they worked at a pace of six verses per hour, but often their rate was closer to three verses per hour. The team of two just finished Titus and are now on the 12th chapter of Proverbs. They're part of a larger team of translators who estimate the completion of the Bible into the language of this Laos minority group occurring in 2017. They started in 2002. Fifteen years of Bible translation. Pray for them. How heavy a burden to carry, translating the most important words in the world into a language that is not your own for a people who have not before heard or read it.

He grabbed me, this young German Bible translator, quickly after the prayer meeting because he heard I was studying classical Greek and soon New Testament Greek in university and thought perhaps I was called to Bible translation. I had never considered it before, and received his invitation with polite distance until he showed me a chart of just a small fraction of Asian people groups who are without a translation of the Bible into their native tongue. One people group had 7.3 million people, almost the size of New York City.

We talked of linguistics and New Testament ethics.

Tomorrow I meet with a professor at the theological seminary down the street.

Goodnight,
js