The first paragraph of this reading is not hard to understand. "Many of us appear to be all right in general, but there are still some areas in which we are careless and lazy; it is not a matter of sin, but the remnants of our carnal life that tend to make us careless"...."We should have no carelessness about us either in the way we worship God, or even in the way we eat and drink." Anyone who has struggled with an eating disorder knows that the issue is something you come back to over and over......because it is a daily need.....to eat....but also a daily struggle....not to over eat. So I was thinking that this would be a straight forward reading today....but Oswald Chambers is rarely easy to understand or simple for me......
Many times in our marriage Bryan and I have needed to learn a new language because we lived in a new country. For Bryan it is rather easy for him.....the language acquisition portion of his brain is wide open and he learns quickly.....for me it is a greater challenge.....perhaps because I lack discipline..... First it was Vietnamese, then Jarai, then Indonesian....which, by the way, was the easiest and quite closely related to the Jarai language from the highlands of Vietnam.....and then we moved to the Philippines and I was fooled.....I thought that since I had learned some Spanish in High School, I would fly through Tagalog since it has obvious similarities.... Instead I learned that Tagalog is an incredibly difficult language.....with prefixes and suffixes to many words......and to add to the discipline difficulty, most everyone spoke English in Manila so the impetus to learn was diminished..... Finally we lived in Thailand and I learned enough Thai to be able to get around in the market and hold a very basic conversation.....
When Bryan and I were in Indonesia, he had to speak at a dinner with many staff and he chose to speak in Indonesian rather than have a translator. I was pregnant with our first child, Jeremy. Bryan got up and began to say who he was and what his job was. Then he introduced me as his wife and that I was a nurse. Everyone started laughing almost hysterically and Bryan had no idea what he had said. Finally someone told him that instead of using the word 'Perawat' which means nurse, he had used the word 'Perawan' which means virgin. And as I stood to greet everyone with my pregnancy quite advanced, this brought down the house with laughter......
So why am I telling you this.....first it is an amusing story and a reminder that we have many times when we learn something new that we are like a child.....making many mistakes but usually being treated with amusement and kindness by those around us......and now we are in Soyo.....needing to learn Portuguese.....and finding the discipline of language study a chore that I have not been committed to. And now I am in my home with a cast on my leg.....and have a young Angolan girl coming to help me with the household needs....and she doesn't speak English and after 7 months, I don't speak Portuguese and I know clearly that although this is a simple example of being brought back to the need for discipline in my life.....it is a lesson I struggle with over and over......and so I am now housebound with the cast and have a real need to be able to speak to this girl.....and so have started with the language tapes again.....Oswald Chamber writes, "God will bring us back in countless ways to the same point over and over again. And He never tires of bringing us back to that one point until we learn the lesson, because His purpose is to produce the finished product."
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