Thankful for the Body of Christ

What a blessing today was! Sid, representing Clearfork Baptist, drove all the way up to deliver a gift and offer words of encouragement. We are so grateful that the Father has allowed us to be a part of this thing called the Body of Christ.

Not Your Everyday Grammar Class

Often people ask us if we are learning language right now in our training.  The short answer is "No." The reason we're not, we usually explain, is that we do not yet know which people group we will end up among, and that wherever we do end up, the language is probably not going to be a written language, nor is it likely known by anyone outside of that group, so there is no way we can learn the language until we are actually there.

But while we are not studying any specific language right now, we are learning how to learn an unwritten language - how to analyze the structure and patterns of any given language (For example, have you ever considered why an English speaker would say "The big red ball," instead of "The red big ball?"). We will need to fully understand the grammatical patterns of the language we work among so that we can put the language into writing, translate Scripture into the language, and teach the people to read their language.  This is the purpose of our current language training.

One of the classes we just finished was a Grammar class in which we analyzed the general grammatical patterns of dozens of different languages. Some of the languages are pretty complex, but below is a simple example to give you a taste of what we've been doing.  These words are nouns from the Michoacan Aztec language in Mexico.

See if you can break apart the words to figure out which part of the word is the noun root, which part of the word shows plurality, and which part shows ownership. The answers are in a comment, which you can access at the bottom right of this post.

The Best Kitchen Help

Hudson is eager to help anytime I'm in the kitchen. I absolutely love it...that is, when I have allowed plenty of time for cleanup.

We had lazy morning to make some muffins.

Like any responsible cook, Hudson makes sure to test the product. 

Watch out, Bobby Flay!

Year In Review

Last night we ushered twenty-eleven out the door by watching a TV special of a guy jumping his motorcycle four hundred feet across a San Diego bay.  Well, I watched.  Rachel gracefully reclined in the cradle of my arm and torso with a glazed look in her eyes.  I admit it was not the most exciting way to end a year.  But the sleepy circumstance of our New Year's Eve bears little resemblance to the twelve months that preceded it.

In short, we:

• Watched Hudson learn to walk, run, and mumble a handful of words,
• Completed our second and final year of Bible training at the New Tribes Bible Institute in Jackson, Michigan,
• Moved into our new apartment near Camdenton, MO to start the second phase of training at New Tribe's Missionary Training Center,
• Learned to hear, produce, and interact with the phonetic sounds found in languages worldwide.  We now know the difference between an unaspirated voiceless alveolar stop and a voiced velar fricative,
• Received an introduction to contextualizing foundational Bible teachings for cross-cultural situations,
• And began the process of contacting potential fields for future ministry.

In this new year, we are honored and blessed to have the opportunity to continue moving toward this goal: to preach God's message of redemption to one of the 2000+ people groups that are still waiting to hear it.  This is not a sprint; it is a marathon.  So much preparation must still be done.  But we keep moving ahead with the joyful assurance that the Lord goes before us.

Thanks for your support, and happy new year!