Monthly Archives: July 2014

Tuesday, we got to spend the afternoon at the Houston Museum of Natural Science with the fabulous Aunt Amelia!  I hope you enjoy a few pictures!

Everybody loved the butterfly exhibit!

Two butterflies landed on Wolverine!

Phoenix explores in the hands-on exhibit

Cyclops checks out the terrarium

Nightcrawler is making a cloud!

Wolverine loved the cloud machine too!

Beast and Nightcrawler making waves.

We are so thankful for the opportunity to spend time exploring Houston before we leave!  Training starts in just over 2 months and then on to begin our full-time positions.  If you want to know more about our assignment and our move, please click here

*We will be working for the Wycliffe Global Alliance after we complete our partnership development and move into our full-time roles.  In order to help explain how the Wycliffe family of organizations works together, we thought a little explanation might help.  We hope you enjoy this post, borrowed from our team leader’s blog.

I love this photo of one of the table groups from our meetings here in Asia.  Actually, we know most of these people.  We’ve even been to some of their countries.  Seven people – seven different countries.  These are leaders of Wycliffe organizations in six countries as well as the director of the Africa Area for the Wycliffe Global Alliance. Each person represents a part of the global Bible translation movement. Each one is connected to an organization that is part of the Wycliffe Global Alliance.

You might be wondering, so what exactly is the Wycliffe Global Alliance?  I thought you worked for Wycliffe Bible Translators.  Actually, both are true.

We are a part of an organization in the USA called Wycliffe Bible Translators, USA, and we are a part of an international organization called the Wycliffe Global Alliance for which Wycliffe USA is a part.

For those of you who give to us, whether you give directly to Wycliffe USA or give through another Wycliffe organization, eventually all gifts to our ministry are sent to Wycliffe USA for processing.  We also receive lots of support services in addition to finances from Wycliffe USA like insurance, retirement planning and some of our training.  Wycliffe USA also serves us and Bible translation in general by advocating for Bible translation in our home country.  Some of you may remember that we also both used to work at the Wycliffe USA office.

However, Bible translation is not just a movement of Americans who serve in the US and abroad.  It’s a global movement.  Just like Wycliffe USA participates in Bible translation, so, too, do another more than 100 organizations around the world.  Each organization serves in Bible translation in different ways.  Some provide resources (like funds, people, and prayer), others serve primarily in promotion or church engagement, and others lead Bible translation programs.

The Wycliffe Global Alliance  is the place where these organizations come together to participate in the Bible translation movement.  It is an organization of organizations, providing opportunities for more and more people to take part in this critical aspect of God’s mission by helping to create an environment for greater and broader participation.  Collectively, the Alliance serves in advocacy with minority language communities to see God’s Word translated, accessible and in use in every language community that still needs it.

For the last several years, we have been seconded by Wycliffe USA to serve on the staff of the Wycliffe Global Alliance.  While we still see and interact with many of our colleagues from Wycliffe USA, it’s been exciting to expand our network and experience with our international community.  We’ve personally seen how God is raising up people from every corner of the globe to participate in this one facet of His mission.

I love how one of our colleagues from Denmark put it.  She says, “Wycliffe needs people from all countries, cultures and language groups. It signals that this is really what the Church wants to do. We are all in this together.” Read what else she had to share.

(The Wycliffe Global Alliance was previously called Wycliffe International.  Read the background about the name change here.)

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. Where was the footprint of God in the history or daily life of these Cameroonian people?  What clue had He planted to let the Hdi 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?

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. “Do you know what this would mean?  This would mean that God kept 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.”

One simple vowel and the meaning was changed from “I love you based on what you do and who you are,” to “I love you, based on Who I am. I love you because of Me and NOT because of you.”

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

The New Testament in Hdi is ready to be printed now, and 29,000 speakers will soon be able to feel the impact of passages like Ephesians 5:25:  “Husbands, ‘dvu’ your wives, just as Christ ‘dvu’-d the church…”  I invite you to pray for them as they absorb and seek to model the amazing, unconditional love they have received.

Around the world, community by community, as God’s Word is translated, people are gaining access to this great love story about how God ‘dvu’-d us enough to sacrifice his unique Son for us, so that our relationship with Him can be ordered and oriented correctly. The cross changes everything!  Someday, the last word of the last bit of Scripture for the last community will be done, and everyone will be able to understand the story of God’s unconditional love.

* Article adapted from a letter by Bob Creson titled One Little Vowel, published to staff of Wycliffe USA on 30 July 2012. Click here to see original article

* Photo by Zeke du Plessis – Two women photographed in a city not far from where the Hdi live.

We hope you enjoy this short video about why we believe Bible translation is important.

Why Bible Translation from Wycliffe USA on Vimeo.