Brook Sarver is a church planting missionary in Thailand, supported by my congregation (among many). He has a great blog about Thailand, its culture, and his attempts to learn how to minister there. Here is a recent post. For more of his humorous and informative writing, click on the link above.
I had my language exam today. And overall, it went… …ok. It wasn’t awesome; although, I didn’t make a single mistake in reading and telling my two stories in Thai. But another part of the exam is to just explain how you would use these stories to teach other people about Christ. No problem, I did that all the time back in the States; or so I thought.
It started off well. I responded to the teacher’s question by starting down a path talking about some things we did back home in ministry there and how people are people and how we should be more concerned about the people coming in the front door of the church than the Christians leaving out the back door all ticked off about something. The problem is that I was thinking perfectly in English and knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t get it out in Thai. I just couldn’t get it out. I was missing words in Thai in my story that were really integral to the telling of my story…. And it sounded awful. It was a train wreck where every time I attempted to say it in a different way, I just kept digging my hole deeper, more trains would come join the wreck.
Eventually we moved on and I was able to scrap together a decent enough Round #2 to salvage the language exam. But it did get me thinking. It’s often easy to get tripped up on words in our own language. You know, like you just can’t think of the word to best use in your situation. Usually you can easily add in a substitute word that will suffice and everyone will move on in conversation. But, in Thai, we don’t have those words yet. The substitute words. And while the Thai person stares at me trying to stumble across the word needed to actually start making sense, I’m running around the in the forest of my mind lost as ever. And every attempt at fixing the train wreck of a conversation on the outside of my head gets me more and more lost in the forest of my mind.
Ah… The joys of language learning…
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