As I stood there, and minutes later as I sat down, I remembered what shame felt like in my body. My cheeks flushed, my armpits sweaty, my arms continually crossing and re-crossing, I just felt stupid.
I’d tried to translate a testimony for my friend in church, and just felt so dumb. Like a failure. One challenge was that he didn’t stick to my limited vocabulary, so I was trying to scrounge around to find a way to communicate his ideas; it’s always more difficult to describe something with several words than it is to just know the literal translation. Secondly, I hadn’t mentally committed to a form of translation. I switched back and forth from using “I” statements, doing a literal translation, and using a “He” form, changing verb tenses left and right. Adding in that I’m switching between tenses…and that he’s speaking in his second language, too. Rough.
Regardless, I felt like a fool. Especially when I accidentally said “when I was 80” instead of “when I was 18”. WHOOPS.
He was super gracious and appreciative of my help translating. I wondered if some of that gratitude, though, was really because he had no idea what I’d said or the mistakes I made. As I sat down, though, my friend said this encouraging thing:
“Nat, the message was clear”.
Tonight, I sat and listened as another guy from our team translated the testimony for the pueblo church service. I took notes on his vocabulary and style, was proud/impressed by his translation, and felt a little sad. I’d lost trust, it felt like; if my teammates wanted translation to be done well, they shouldn’t ask me.
The truth remains that he’s a much better translator than I, but it still was a bitter horse pill to swallow when we stood together and he was asked to translate something I easily could have.
TRANSLATION: My identity had gotten wrapped up in this weird role I was able to serve for my team. When I “lost the job”, I felt I’d lost confidence and security, which meant it didn’t really exist in those places to begin with.
The other day in some time with God, I was praying about a situation involving pride. As I prayed, I got a vision: It was someone taking their pride into their hands and biting into it as you would a thick sandwich. The person in the picture was masticating and breaking down the strength of its physical structure, swallowing it with a gulp, and welcoming this pride to go through an acid bath, an enzyme wash, and a dehydration process that dismembered the original substance into something we call “meirda” in Spanish.
Then, he pooped out the pride. (This is literally how the holy spirit speaks to me)
Then this scripture came to mind: “I consider all things as loss for the sake of knowing Yeshua the Messiah, my Lord, for whose wake I have forsaken everything and consider it all as dung, that I may gain the Messiah”. (Phillians 3:8)
He swallowed his pride, and it came out as foul excrement. It was a potent expression of the nature and value of this sort of pride. Of my pride.
Obviously, good translation is important, whether it is in other languages, or ‘translating’ scriptures about humility into practical terms in daily life. But at the same time, it doesn’t matter that much. Definitely not enough to have permission to dictate my worth or identity.
So I am swallowing my pride, learning from others, and trying to keep getting closer to the heart/meaning/intent…of Jesus & of my community. I don’t want my freedom in Christ to get lost in the quest for perfect translations.
