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“Language Barrier” This phrase is often used as an excuse. I know because I’ve used it plenty since arriving in Asia. I knew Asia would be different from Africa. On the race, change can be one of your only constants. Vietnam brought new foods (pho fa days), people and culture. I became a pro at eating with chop-sticks and I’m accustomed to road medians being merely suggestions, not guidelines. I loved our hosts and our ministry, but for some reason the small amount of English speakers caught me off guard. In Africa, most people spoke English which made it easier to build relationships and share The Gospel. In Vietnam, we realized quickly that English speakers were hard to come by, which made sense because our ministry for the month was teaching English. I was using the ‘language barrier’ excuse as a crutch for my lack of boldness. I mean Google Translate can only go so far. Not to mention we were in a closed country where it was illegal to openly share our faith. I was living out of fear and God was about to call me out for it. On our last day in Vietnam – we said goodbye to the group of pastors that had been our English students for the month. Some of these men had been put in prison for years because of their faith yet they still pursued a relationship with the Lord and that motivated us in our own walks. Celenne gave the pastors a word of encouragement that she explained she wanted to share at the beginning of the month, but didn’t because of the language barrier. When she finished, one of the pastors, Di stood up to give some farewell words. Di was tall with white peppered hair and a child-like spirit. He removed his glasses. I looked him in the eyes and before the translator could interpret – I somehow knew exactly what he was saying. God was speaking to me through Di. The translator relayed that Di had encouraged us to not view language as a hinderance – we should love others as God intended and what we might feel is holding us back – shouldn’t. Here I was, living with a lens blurred with excuses sitting in front of a group of pastors who had experienced a lifetime of ‘barriers’ – barriers of prison and leaving their families for the sake of Jesus. Things were coming into focus. Since then, I’ve been refocusing my heart. Don’t get me wrong, translators are the bomb, but I was reminded we can demonstrate The Gospel through our actions without saying a single word. We have spent this month in a providence of Phnom Penh, Cambodia with the most beautiful people and once again only a handful speak English. At night I sleep in a room, sharing the same floor with a family of six – all with little English speaking skills. Yet, I can feel and see God’s love through them. A few of my teammates got sick and the mother prayed over them, sang to them and acted as their mother away from home – all without speaking a word of the same language. This family opened up their home to us and even moved their bed out of the one room of the home so that we could have space to lay our sleeping bags down. The father of the family has had obstacle after obstacle put in front of him – his father and multiple siblings were killed during the Khmer Rouge regime and he struggled many times to figure out how to feed his nine children. At times he lived on less than a dollar a day. But he sat in front of me this week, with a wrinkled smile on his face while his son translated and told us his story and testimony of his love for Jesus. After that, am I going to sit here and let a difference in language stop me from loving others? No.
I don’t think barriers are meant to stop us in our tracks and make us turn around and go back home – they are meant to refocus our attention. The story in the Bible about the Tower of Babel came to mind after Di’s encouragement in Vietnam (Gen 11: 1-9). At one time, all people spoke the same language. But we, as humans, tend to want to build towers as high as the heavens with little input from God. Because everyone spoke the same language, communication was easy and life was good – this left little room for the people to turn to God for direction. Mankind wanted to ‘make a name for themselves’ (Gen 11:4), building towers on sand instead of the solid ground that the Lord provides. Of course, God wants the best for us and He is the best – so when He saw people relying on themselves rather than Him – he mixed things up a bit. Different groups were given variant languages and they spread out into the land. God gave us unique languages so that we could redirect and turn to Him when we reach the barrier – not so that we turn around and go back home. Wendell Berry explains it well, “Form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
As always – Berry nailed it. We all come to barriers in life. So let us not turn around and go back home. If a difference in language makes us feel like we no longer know which way to go – then we begin our real journey. We can refocus and redirect by asking God how we can love others well without saying a word.
PS – We just went through team changes before coming to Cambodia and I’m so pumped about the new group of women that I get to do life with for the next few months! You can check out their blogs on the sidebar of this page. One of my teammates, Emily Helton still needs just over $1K more to raise until she’s fully funded if you’re interested in donating you can do so at her blog –> emilyhelton.theworldrace.org |
