Drawn to Translation

If you talk to ten different missionaries, you might get ten different answers as to how God called them to missionary service.

When I married Ed, I knew I would follow wherever he led. So when he told me he thought we should go to seminary to prepare for full-time Christian work, I went willingly even though I felt no personal call. During Ed’s final year of seminary, a member of Wycliffe Bible Translators came to Portland to share Wycliffe’s vision of giving the Bible to every people group in their own language and to show a missionary film. Ed saw her presentation at the seminary. I saw it that evening at a church.

Was my heart touched by the plight of the dark skinned people living in poverty? No. I blush to confess I didn’t think I could ever love people like that. What caught my attention was a missionary family navigating a river in the jungles of South America in a dugout canoe. As a young person, I’d enjoyed a few rides in a rowboat on a small lake in the Snake River Canyon. To learn to handle a dugout canoe on a jungle river seemed to me the ultimate adventure. A shallow reason to become a missionary? Perhaps, but God knew how to get my attention; He also knew how to deepen my commitment.

The morning after we heard the missionary’s presentation, Ed sat at the breakfast table wondering how he could tell me God had touched his heart through that film. It reminded him of people he had seen in New Guinea during World War II. Before he got his thoughts verbalized, I turned from stirring the oatmeal to ask, “Do you think we could be Bible translators?” We both felt drawn to this work. The missionary encouraged us to go to SIL, Wycliffe’s summer training program at the University of Oklahoma. So we began saving every spare penny.

About the time we thought we had enough laid by to cover our summer expenses, our two-year-old daughter became ill. She couldn’t keep anything on her stomach, and the doctor didn’t know what was wrong. Finally, when she became dehydrated, we took her to the hospital and the doctor decided she had appendicitis. Her appendix had ruptured and the danger of spreading the infection was too great for him to operate. The only thing to do was wait and see if it would seal itself over.

Wait -- is anything more difficult? After praying desperately for our darling, and asking why, and crying until I exhausted my supply of tears, I found peace when I finally said, “Father, whatever happens, give me grace to glorify you.” My commitment was deepening.

God was gracious. The appendix did seal itself over, but the doctor said it must come out as soon as our little girl was well enough to stand an operation. The medical bills in Portland had wiped out our meager savings. We returned home to Ontario, Oregon wondering why God seemed to be closing a door. We still had an unmistakable impression we were to attend SIL.

We shared with our home church the burden God had laid on our hearts to translate the Bible for a language group who didn’t even have a written language. They caught the vision and things began to happen. A skilled surgeon in the church offered his services at no charge. He performed the operation and all we owed was the hospital bill. Little by little, gifts of money came in from church members. By the time we needed to leave for summer school, the hospital bill was paid. We told God, “We have enough money to get to Oklahoma and pay the tuition. We’ll trust you to bring in what we need for our summer expenses.”

We were advised not to bring our children if we could make satisfactory arrangements for them because the SIL course was very demanding. Ed’s folks were willing to keep them for the summer. So, leaving our daughter not completely recovered from an appendectomy, and knowing we would miss her third birthday and our son’s first birthday, we set out for Oklahoma.

By the end of the first week, I was ready to pack up and go home. Demanding was not a strong enough word to describe the SIL course. We were not studying a written language; we were learning how to analyze a language that had never been written. In Phonetics class, we not only had to learn to hear every sound the human vocal apparatus can produce, we had to produce those sounds and record them with symbols. Then there was Phonemics. It was more like math than grammar. Math itself is a foreign language to me. In Phonemics, we learned how to take the raw material of phonetics and devise an alphabet for an unwritten language. Grammar made a little more sense to me, but was unlike any grammar I had studied where I had to learn the rules of a written language and abide by them. In this class we were learning how to deal with an unwritten language—and make up the rules!

I found some relief for my aching heart by borrowing a little girl about the age of our daughter. One of the mothers on staff was happy for me to “adopt” her little darling whenever I could spare a few hours from my studies.

We struggled through that course and submitted our application to the Wycliffe Bible Translators. At the end of the summer we went before the screening committee with much apprehension. God was with us and to our surprise, we were accepted as translation personnel. We returned home jubilant and broke. As I reached out my aching arms to our one-year-old son, imagine the pain that pierced this mother’s heart when he went toddling to Grandma.