Lost in Translation
Our first Sunday in
Mozambique, our squad in Murrumbala split up into our small teams to go to several local churches.
Nessa, with Scott preaching, headed about 15 minutes away to a new church.
We arrived and decided to go invite people to the service. The pastor asked one of the local men to take Stephanie, Amanda and I around the village, or so we thought.
We started walking and kept walking, and just to make things fun, we walked a little bit more.
We had no translator with us, the two that had come with us to the church had stayed behind because we weren’t supposed to be long.
Communication was fairly difficult, the man spoke portugese, and of course we didn’t, although Stephanie’s spanish helped a lot.
We finally stopped and thought we were going to be inviting people to the church, and to our amazement, it was a church and the guy wanted us to speak.
My first thought was wait a second..hold up…I thought we were inviting people, not speaking.
We have no translator and none of us really knows portugese or Sena (the local tribal language).
I looked at Stephanie and Amanda and they seemed a little bit confused as well.
We talked to the man and told him (as best we could) that we could sing a few songs and pray, but we didn’t know portugese and also needed to get back to the team as church was starting oh about 15 minutes ago.
We finished praying and started to head back to the church that our team was at, again that is what we thought.
As we continued to walk, the guy starts telling us that he wants to take us to several more churches.
We thought we communicated to him that we needed to head back and because we were going back the way we had come, I thought he understood.
Wrong. He took us to another church, at which we prayed for them.
We leave that church and start walking again and by this point we are all praying, not having a clue about what is going on.
Thoughts are running through my head…Lord what is going on? Whats up with the communication? Are you trying to tell us something or teach us something?…I’m not frustrated and am actually finding it a little bit amusing by this point but also know that Scott and Linnea are probably starting to worry because at least 45 minutes have gone by.
We keep walking and again this man takes us to another church and tells us that we are only going to be a few minutes.
As we are standing outside waiting to enter the mud building, Amanda said that she wishes one of the translators was with us and that one of them would come find us.
The pastor invites us in as they are singing and dancing, we are trying to be polite but know that we need to leave.
About 5 minutes pass and I turn around and our translator Nelito is standing in the doorway.
Thankyou Lord.
The lost have been found.
Well I guess we weren’t really that lost, but didn’t really know where exactly we were.
Finally we head back with Nelito to the church were Scott would be speaking, and found that we really weren’t that far away.
So everything turned out good, Stephanie, Amanda, and I had a nice little adventure.
Shared some laughter and learned what the phrase “lost in translation” really means. And who knows what the Lord was doing in that situation.
Maybe I’ll never know.
