Learning As We Go

This is a heartfelt THANK YOU to Homeschoolblogger.com and TOS for hosting this site for almost five years.

I’ll be moving over to a new blog here if you’d like to keep following– I hope you do!  I’m back online, posting and reading blogs again and hope to reconnect with you.

I was given a copy of Davey & Marie Jank’s new book, Our Witchdoctors Are Too Weak: The rebirth of an Amazon Tribe, and tore through it.  Reading it was like being taken on a tour of an Amazon village by a stand-up comic.

Davey Jank spent over ten years as a part of a missionary language team among the Wilo people before their team began to share “God’s Talk” with them.  These ten years are shared via anecdotes that left me wanting more.  He laughs at himself, at his expectations, at his weaknesses… but never at the Wilo people.

The Wilo call the Bible “God’s Talk.”  Their language doesn’t have a word for “word.”  I love words, and language, and the Janks’ musings on language in general are insightful and entertaining.  The Wilo kept telling Davey their language was easy to learn, but it’s clear that learning a language from scratch– not to mention devising its written form– was a formidable task.  Their team took great pains to make sure that they understood the Wilo language well enough to translate God’s Talk without planting cultural blunders within their translation.

This is not a book of theology.  It is a love story– albeit told by a comedian– about God’s love for the Wilo people.  Once the team finally reached the point of being able to share God’s Talk with the Wilo, Davey Jank was scared to death.  He lists all the wrong assumptions the Wilo had about the Bible: that it was a rule book, a guide for good living, or a retelling of their own myths and legends.   “We hadn’t attempted to correct these wrong assumptions; the Bible would speak for itself.  What would the Wilo think when they realized that the Bible was about relationships, primarily between God and man?”

Yet despite living on a different continent, having had access to the written word– and Word– nearly my entire life, having as much education as I have… don’t I often work with those same assumptions?  What I appreciated most about the Janks’ book is their trust in God and in God’s Talk: that it would speak for itself.

Transfiguration, by an unknown Byzantine. From the Getty Museum

Our pastor gave a wonderful sermon Sunday on the Transfiguration, and how Peter, James and John had a glimpse through time to the End.  They saw Jesus glorified, and all of time– The Law, The Prophets, The Kingdom– telescoped together.  And then they had to walk back down the mountain and not be afraid to face Passion Week and the cross.

Obviously, I’m not saying it nearly as well as he did.  But I had a glimpse of how I want to live.  I want to be so full of the vision of Jesus glorified that I am not afraid.  That I am willing to walk the spiritual life ahead of me.

So I think for Lent I’ll be doing my best not to be on the computer.  I anticipate checking emails on Sunday, but I won’t be in this space until after Easter.  Or checking other blogs till then, either.

Bless you in your walk until Easter.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us,  fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.”  Hebrews 12:1-2

My post tomorrow says that I’m taking a blogging break till Easter, but I wanted to ask you to check back at the beginning of April for a review of a book I’m excited to share with you, Davey and Marie Jank’s Our Witchdoctors Are Too Weak: The Rebirth of an Amazon Tribe.

A blessed Lent to you!

I expect to post just once more in this series of Independence Days posts, but it won’t come till after Easter.  I’ve enjoyed keeping track of all the little ways we’re tried to be faithful stewards of our small bit of earth, and the relationships it provides.

Plant Something: We put in spinach, lettuce, and peas, though nothing has sprouted and the mornings have been so cold, I don’t think I’d want to sprout either.

Harvest Something: nothing.

Preserve Something: my sanity?  Just kidding.

Waste Not: It irks me that it is often cheaper (and certainly easier!) to replace something altogether than to fix it.  So last week, I dug around online to find replacement wheels for the dishwasher rack, and foam covers for the headphones.  (SweetP likes to take things apart, and then chew the foam covers.  I know: Ewww.)  Also, I patched the holes in the wall that have been there… er, two and a half years?We’re going to use an old 4′x4′ square garden frame that Sam replaced in the vegetable garden as a flower bed in front of the fence.  This week we worked on moving the river rock.  Also, we’ve been taking care of the compost.

Want Not: my friend Renee shared some of her red lentils with me.  They make the yummiest Jerusalem Lentil Soup.

Build Community Food Systems:  Nothing.  But Sam has me contemplating chickens.  Of course, our HOA forbids them.

Eat the food:  Ah, here we excel.  We had a most delicious Plum-berry tart this week, make from the description in Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food.  Yum.

Also, we enjoyed pantry onions, peaches, tomatoes, and jam; and frozen peaches, raspberries (in that there tart), plums, beef, sausage, and tomato soup.