Lost in Translation

For one semester in college, my uninterrupted journey from high school to pastoring faced its first interruption. I was wooed by the romantic world of Bible translation. I was enthralled by the idea of going to faraway places and helping to deliver God's Word to them, particularly in languages that no one else knew. One group, a tribe in Northern Africa, only had 1500 people speaking their language. But that was 1500 people without the Bible, without the Gospel.

I also love languages. I love how they work. I love how they teach us about how human beings think and how societies are structured. Language and culture are two sides of the same coin, and the more we understand language, the more we understand a culture. I wanted to become a translator.

As I write this, I am not translating the Bible in a far off area. I am sitting in Northern MI in a pastor's office. But I still think I am a Bible translator.

We are all translators in one way or another. I am amazed at how quickly people translate words into full-blown concepts, irrationally holding onto the idea that one word has one meaning.

For example, I just read a great article by Tim Keller on Biblical justice. Some of the first comments were not about the article, but about how America is turning into a "welfare state" (government assistance was never mentioned in the article). Justice, it seems, translated to a particular government program. I wish someone told that to Amos before he promised that justice would come like a flowing stream.

Mis-translation shuts down conversation. It has the ability to keep people from truly communicating. Narrow translation creates an environment where I can dismiss you and figure out what you're going to say before you say it. And if you say the same thing I do, but a little bit differently, I have the power to still declare you ignorant and wrong.

Where mis-translation is one of the great sins of our society, proper translation is one of the greatest blessings. Proper translation is a hallmark of good listening. Proper translation is when I hear someone speak, and instead of putting it through all my fancy filters of "right and wrong," I simply let their idea hit the table so that we can all play with it. And I can summarize what you say without adding my own agree/disagree to it.

The capacity to listen and translate well, in my opinion, is one of the highest marks of spiritual maturity. I wonder what the impact would be if a few people in your church, your neighborhood or your town were able to listen well. I wonder what the world would look like if we had a few less commentators and a few more translators. Maybe it would look a little more like the Kingdom of God.