Dear Friends,
Greetings from Guatemala. Nan is presently in the Rockies driving back East with Molly, our precious middle daughter who has had some lumps and is headed home. We're grateful that we will all be together at Christmas, Lord enabling.
Elisa has started a new job (still as a physical therapist) so she can be home more often with the twins. See the attached pictures. Yury and his brother's leather business is prospering. For several months they prayed for work and now they are praying for workers to help with the load. They have been swamped for the last three months. It's good for the bottom line, but hard on the family with all the extra hours at the shop.
Isaac is well and still involved teaching Sunday School to three and four year olds with the other members of the band. He's still at Starbucks and the band continues to pray for a long-term contract.
I spent three days in Comitancillo recently. Our friend Byron, who works with the Vaters, our Wycliffe colleagues, and who was a student of mine in Lima in 2006, heads up a literacy program that trains volunteer teachers from local churches to teach their adult members and friends to read. This is not easy to do. Getting volunteers is hard; getting people to come to class is hard; getting them to remember what they've learned is hard. Keeping everyone's motivation up is hard. But Byron and his colleagues have done just that.
I went for the graduation of 50 new readers. They were joined by last year's fifty grads and a lot of well-wishers, some 125 in all. The grads had met two days a week, three hours per session for 16 weeks.
Byron had them on the floor playing word games and singing songs and giving testimonies, and it was altogether overwhelming to me. One woman came forward and said, "Six month ago, I didn't know what an 'a,' an 'e,' an 'i' or a 'j' were, and now I can read God's Word in my own language." People were beaming, and reading and laughing. This woman and dozens of others were holding their New Testaments and their hymnbooks tightly to their chests. I was also delighted that so many people from different churches were using the hymnbook produced by a man in a different denomination. This may not sound like a big deal, but it is. Denominational walls are high, but there is signs that they may be cracking. It was amazing. Byron invited me to town to give a talk on why people should continue to speak their native language and not trade it for Spanish. As if they needed any inspiration. I got up to talk and just couldn't get the words out, as I looked around at a full house straining to hear the gringo speak Mam, Eventually the words came and I was honored to be a part of the day's events.
Thousands of people heard this dear sister talk about her new relationship to "a, e, i and j" because the whole event went out live on local radio. Byron said that as he visited several churches the following Sunday, and other people talked of that one woman's testimony and what it meant to them. The radio station also plays a chapter of the Dramatized New Testament twice a day.
Yale professor and historian Lamin Sanneh says that when the Scriptures get into the local language, the genie is out of the bottle and he never goes back. Not just the message of the Gospel gets out, but the meta-message gets out and people's view of who they are and what their place is in the world changes. The meta-message (which means the message about the Message) is that God speaks our language; He cares about us, He's not foreign and inaccessible; although Spanish has shamed us and put us down and oppressed us, and limited our options, God is now speaking to us in our own language and it is so sweet and so clear and so life-changing.
Sanneh goes on to say that the slave masters and geo-political colonizers promoted the Gospel to sedate the masses and keep Blacks and Indians in their subservient place, but as it ended up, it was the Gospel that brought colonialism to its knees. How fitting.
Colonial powers used missionaries--often unwittingly from the missionary point of view--as part of their scheme for conquest, but in the end, the Message of the Gospel got through, both the message of Jesus as well as the implications of what it means that God speaks "my" language. And the world changes.
Locally, we're in evaluation mode at the end of the first semester here in Guatemala City. One Mayan man said, "You know, I can read and write my language, but I never knew how much there is to write about. Two months ago, I had written nothing for anyone and now I'm a published author with ten titles to my name including stories, essays, poetry, puzzles, technical articles, a booklet of riddles and a play."
Most of these still need polishing, but students have caught a lovely vision for reading and writing their "L1," their first language. We have ten students, all L1 speakers of a minority language--8 languages in all, plus Spanish. They hail from Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia and Peru.
We promote all this because for people to become readers, they need stuff to read. In many ways we can't compete with the Spanish market with all the glitz and variety, but since Spanish is foreign and "other," we have found that literature in L1 is well received and much appreciated. Our prayer is that people would learn to read well enough to choose to read the Scriptures and come to understand what the Message and the meta-message mean to them and to their families.
Christmas. Lord enabling, I'll be going from 75 degrees and perfect weather to Raleigh, somewhat south of perfect. At least the family will be together. And then snow and ice for New Year's in Ashland. But not for long. I head back to Guatemala on January 3 for another 8 weeks. Nan will join me for part of that.
Just a reminder, December 21 is the shortest day of the year and each succeeding day is a bit longer carrying us inexorably toward spring and summer. So don't despair. Spring's coming in just 90 days. And think of us here in Guatemala, the Land of Eternal Spring, no matter how short the day.
Thanks much for your prayers and thoughts. We appreciate your partnership.
Blessings to you and Merry Christmas.
Wes, for all
