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May 2013
One little vowel…or, what difference does grammar make, anyway?
Translator Lee Bramlett was confident that God had left His mark on the Hdi culture somewhere, but though he searched, he could not find it. What clue had He planted to let this people group in Cameroon know Who He was and how He wanted to relate to them?
Then one night in a dream, God prompted Lee to look again at the Hdi word for love. Lee and his wife, Tammi, had learned that verbs in Hdi consistently end in one of three vowels. For almost every verb, they could find forms ending in i, a, and u. But when it came to the word for love, they could only find i and a. Why no u?
So Lee asked the Hdi translation committee, which included the most influential leaders in the community, “Could you ‘dvi’ your wife?” “Yes,” they said. That would mean that the wife had been loved but the love was gone. “Could you ‘dva’ your wife?” “Yes,” they said. 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?” Everyone 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 you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would be compelled to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say ‘dvu.’ It just doesn’t exist.”
Lee sat quietly for a while, thinking about John 3:16, and then he asked, “Could God ‘dvu’ people?”
There was complete silence for three or four minutes; then tears started to trickle down the weathered faces of these elderly men. Finally they responded. “This would mean that God kept on loving us over and over, millennia after millennia, while all that time we rejected His great love. He is compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people.”
God had encoded the story of His unconditional love right into their language. The Hdi reasoned, if God was like that, and not a mean and scary spirit, did they need the spirits of the ancestors to intercede for them? Did they need sorcery to relate to the spirits? Many decided the answer was no, and the number of Christ-followers quickly grew from a few hundred to several thousand.
We are so grateful to God for calling us into this ministry, and for the impact Bible translation is having on millions of people’s lives in Africa. Those of you who pray and give financially are also part of the global team He is putting together to finish this task, and you share the credit for every life that is changed as a result. We thank God for every one of you! For those of you who are not yet part of this team, please consider getting involved. We invite you to share in the task—and the joy—of seeing all the remaining people groups in the world get the Scriptures in their language—in this generation.
John and I have been at this for 30 years now, and with Derek and Hannah reaching adulthood, we’re gearing up for the next 30 years, as God enables us! The graphic below represents all that’s left for us to be 100% funded for this next phase. Please pray for the Lord to identify these 43 new monthly partners, so we can “climb on our bikes” and get going! And if you feel like you’re one of them, click anywhere on the graphic to let us know how you want to get involved. We’d love to get together with you, either in person or on Skype, to tell you more and hear how God is working in your life as well.
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Wishing you a glorious spring,
Barb,
for us all
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