God, When Will You Speak in My Tongue?

I have spoken a lot about my passion to see the Word of God translated into every person's heart language; however, there is a passion more powerful than this---that of the personally yearning---the passion that the Bibleless people of the earth have to receive it themselves. The poem below was written by a man from Southern Sudan, as he tried to put words to his desire to receive the Bible in his language.

As I've expressed here before, some of the places where Bible translation is still needed have few to no believers yet. However, in much of Africa, there are places where the Gospel was brought decades ago and there is a vibrant church, but no Bible in the language of the people! As Ed Lauber (a missionary in Ghana) puts it, "In such cases, believers long to have God’s word in a language they really understand. They know that the Bible is being translated into languages around them, and they wonder when it will be their turn."

God, When Will You Speak in My Tongue?

Far and near

It is said that you, God, speak!

How do you do that?

Is it in their tongues?

If it is truly so,

God, when will you speak in my tongue?

East and west, north and south,

The Creator speaks, it is said!

Not in the language as of birds;

But in other human tongues I cannot understand!

God, when will you speak in my tongue?

Children and grown-ups of other lands,

With their different tongues,

Know your voice.

In their tongues you speak a special message to them!

If you speak messages in different tongues,

God, when will you speak in my tongue?

In the world around, we perceive you,

Yet your language is not clear.

We want to know you personally,

We want to hear you speak to us.

If you know all tongues,

God, when will you speak in my tongue?

We search you as a treasure.

Our eyes look on mountains, rivers,

Even in caves, forest and world around us.

Many voices are heard, confused we become,

If your voice is one, as of that of the Creator of all,

God, when will you speak in my tongue?

Oh! God, Creator of all people,

You who do not segregate,

Is it possible to hear you speak?

Can you speak in my tongue?

God, when will you speak in my tongue?

—James Lokuuda Kadanya

James speaks the Toposa language of South Sudan, which is spoken by more than a half million people. Today he is operating Salt and Light Outreach Ministries in South Sudan.

This post originally appeared on July 22, 2011, at http://blog.theseedcompany.org/bible-translation-2/god-when-will-you-speak-in-my-tongue-2/#.VLbDw8aUf8E

Advent

.

A year has clambered past
wrestle-trickling across the barren waiting floor.
I shift like time sand swiftly to and through
a decade of astonishing pause
Held-breath and suffering,
Dry eyes and puddle heart,
wracked flesh, soul on an alter
And we have sacrificed.
But small stubborn seeds pop heavy in time
Ripe with wild, precarious hope
hemmed in safely
Nestled where they grow,
Urging to not just wait well
but to want with conviction.
You uncurl my grip-white fists
so the delicate fingertips will feel
every   last   drop
the rush of everything as it spills over
Ample measures, long awaited, too much to hold.
Whirling dervishes of color
that pour down the aisles
rushing to light the candle—
in memory of a people longing for your arrival
in reverence for all current languishing
and your faithful cracking open of the darkness each time.
So you gently unearth them
small vials of light
Little moments—liquid, brilliant—moments of Emmanuel
that light the path for when we can’t see the star

.

January 11, 2010 - Hope Like Egrets

Now there is only stillness
This very day it is only calm, only gray and waiting.
Blue droplets gathering silver,
Dross transformed, and hoping

Straight lines like clavicles
That start off at the center—bold—
Have tapered off behind narrow sinews
Disappearing into the greater structure
Absolved and absorbed
And it is good.
That clarity waits to shoulder the curves—
The weight of everything not yet made straight:

Hiccupping impasses,
Whorled, woolly declarations,
Cloaked eyes and hurtling hearts—

All will bear down on this road
And not, not, not snap the fiber that came first.
It is in that grace that they exhale.


There was another day with a shallower stillness that came before.
The dam held back the flow of everything behind,
November crisped out of everything that lay ahead—
Like small gasps under small steps,
Fallow things snapped out the rhythm of vacuous deaths beneath my boots and the season

Then one white bird on thin, long legs.
Stark, cut curves poised over foam-scraped sand
Tall and sharp like elegant rejection
Beautiful like grief and steel.

Everything shudders to a halt.
Months of chaos and isolation stare back, drip off a beak; made still in rigid eyes
One white-draped spot in a haze of yellowed green-gray, and the world makes sudden sense as an egg.
Every bit of now is the groaning—
Unhatched but incubating hope, joy just beneath a shell.
Lean-lined life that looks beige, too delicate, until it breaks through and isn’t.
So much life held in with paper-thin birthing barricades
But it will be born. It will all be borne.
It is in that grace that we exhale.

And hope is a swirling thing that grows from one to many—
Letting go is like the steps that came after; braver from seeing the one bird, but prepared for it to be enough—
Despair and Peace will both hear you coming, and sometimes still waters can go either way
That lake met me with undulations—Soul-holes whistling with the static charge of wind where barbs had just been pulled out—my acceptance, my approach set the sky in a flipped-white blaze
Wings everywhere
Fifty birds swirled around us, twisty circles, swift oscillation
Green-gray lines swallowed entirely by ribboned white, now flapping, now dropping
Hope like egrets, folding; feathered origami blossoms in the trees
Small and white like elegant redemption
Beautiful like thorns and tears

It was like the first snow of winter, and it has caused the thaw.


Posted on 11 January 2010 at 11:27 PM Comments (1)

March 6, 2009 - Another Experiment

So.. it's one in the morning, and I have just finished an "assignment" that is technically an assignment for my students, but as I think I've mentioned on here before, with creative writing that we ask them to read aloud to the class, my co-teacher and I have promised that we will always write on the topic as well, and come prepared to share what we've written, so it is not just them under a spot-light that's ravaging their confidence, but also us in all our nerdy, adult vulnerability..

It is once again during our unit on the novel The House on Mango Street; just a wonderful little book to teach lyrical/poetic prose with, and to give freshmen a heaving dose of literary devices... So we ask them to write a few vignettes in the style of the author (Sandra Cisneros) and this week's needed to be a treatise on or vivid memory of music in their life.

And here is the bleary teacher's-edition of the mimic-assignment:


There is a silken web that winds itself in and around and under me—shot up my veins like an internal tree running roots down my arms through my throat—the glue between a million little polaroids. It is notes, songs, snatches of harmonies that wind gnarly vines around soul and set it free from body. If travel has been the demolisher of my walls, music was what kept me in one piece during the glorious fall-out. It is the haze that my breath blew on the windows of a boxcar as the train whirred onward to somewhere new; dissonant chords rolling off Thom Yorke's tongue, sent to light the fire in my belly—baby’s got the bends—and so did I… pressurized, and about to burst.

It is the hours spent on a piece of carpet, with a long-adored brother, eyes closed, listening while eternity drips slow to the layers in an album—Innocence Mission—and my heart on fire—O happy, O happy, the end, the end, the end—she says. Because music is like water, whirling around in ringlets of change, lilting through and welding together chapters of life to form a whole. Because it is only music, and light, and water and God that transcend the gaps and gutters that the rest of life digs deep.

It is the wild-hearted drum-circle, spontaneously combusting after the Easter service at my church, and docks that shook with the voices of youth camp kids, cluttered together to join and surpass the worshiping toads. It is the funereal dance around the blazing fire, one white-hot whisper, so much life found in that Ghanaian celebration at another man’s death.

And maybe then we are like notes. Each bobbing along, suspended at times, meeting others to form chords—some combinations disastrous, clashing gongs, but unrelentingly powerful—and others the sweet tilt of harmony, trills in form of relationship. Our own music that breaks wide the marching lines of time and leaves something wispy on a page to mark the crescendo.

Posted on 6 March 2009 at 1:06 AM Comments (1)

January 20, 2009 - Mercy

Mercy
Drawn seeds from tree unborn,
gnomey limbs and strong-armed form--flourishing.
Now not yet, my love.
Me, not you, my love.
Responses with my face but not from me
Limb from limb, I draw my strength from thee.


Posted on 20 January 2009 at 1:37 AM

Nov. 21, 2008 - Reflections on an odd day, without reflecting on the day at all, but rather adding some small part of it to this place..

So today was a lot.
In a lot of different ways.
But as I was lying down to close it, I smiled at the way the class-part of my day went.. Fun students, and a room full of people trying to turn their memories into metaphors!~ Maybe only a scene an english-nerd could love.. but it was enjoyable.

Today was "I Am" Poem day;.. something I've done since my second semester of teaching with the first co-teacher I ever really clicked with...It's a very structured poem. Only now we were tying it to The House on Mango Street.. how Esperanze (hope!) is told that she cannot erase her memories... "you are Mango Street".. The concept that you are, in some powerful ways, the sum of all your history; all your vivid memories--good or bad--combining to form someone made of dust and sunny days and kinship and cold.

So from a list of topics, each student had to take notes on the most vivid memory they had for each of the categories we gave them. These range from "a pet memory" to "a time you were scared" and "your first crush".. Then we read our examples--To give them an idea of how to re-present their memories as quick images, small sentences, packed polaroids, so much memory pushed into a corner with the hope that there the squeaze-out may be something interesting.. So as an offering to the pillow before me, here's mine (written back the first time we taught the assignment though):


I AM
I am the growing shout of “go-----oal!” husking from my father’s otherwise gentle voice
I am letters written to the love I haven’t met yet I am shove, tear, fight through feeling rawness and weariness, to resplendent joy
I am the single thunder lamp lighting literacy lessons for the Ghanaian village
I am the silly first story written without any expectations
I am glinting Christmas lights squinted at from the base of 20 feet of green
I am the cracking concussion of a head on a swing as I slump to the grass after the fall
I am the apple orchard, bending wide my arms to gather in cousins, juice-pith, and seeds
I am a red-haired chow-chow, dashing at the first glimpse of an accidentally-open door
I am drenched boots and dramatic conclusions cracking through the ice on lake Jenushka
I am whispers to my sister between the bunk bed and wall until stars are yawning, gape-mouthed
I am the summer of 2002, ill, feeling like death and puddles
I am the daughter of Brazilian rhythm laced between the oompa-pa’s
I am the lead foot on the accelerator, trembling for 1,000 miles to see the scars on his wrists
I am red sleds pitched around snowy gutters, playing house with my kindred sis
I am struggling eye sight, blinking, staring, longing for what’s next

Posted on 21 November 2008 at 12:26 AM Comments (0)