Dying of Deliciousness (1993)
Message from Urbana 93by Neil Anderson
"When the full weight of what it cost God to love the world became real to them, one man said, ‘We’re dying of the deliciousness of these words.'"
Several
years ago, my wife and I went to the country of Papua New Guinea,
to serve with Wycliffe Bible Translators. We’d only been there for a
few months when the men of the village invited me to go with them on a hunting
trip. It was two days’ journey through the bush in a remote part of the
country to get to their favorite hunting ground. After the first day we were
going to sleep in a shelter of an overhanging cliff. They call it [kydi]1.
It rains a lot there in the jungle. It rains four hundred inches of rain a year. That overhang cliff provided the only dry spot in an ocean of wetness. And these twenty-five hunters were jammed in there, heads up against the cliff, feet out toward their fires. We were right out at the edge of the dry spot, and you put your hand out there, and it’s just rain. That’s where we were bedding down for the night.
I was totally exhausted. They pulled up some bracken fern, and some bits of
bark cloth over them to sleep, and I had a mat and a blanket over me, because
I’m a softie. After about fifteen minutes of trying to go to sleep I
looked around. There I was jammed in there with these buddies – these
world class hunters – these Fotoba guys, who felt right at home here.
And I noticed that my blanket was over two of them on this side, and two of
them on that side. Well, you wouldn’t want to waste a good blanket.
The next morning, I was awakened before it was fully light. I heard someone sort of talking half out loud somewhere down the line in this shelter. It was the first thing I heard. It was just in the half light of morning. And then I heard somebody else talking. And then over there and then here. And then I realized that they were praying. They like to pray kind of half out loud. Pretty soon the whole line of them were praying.
I had been trying to learn the language, and had a bit of a grasp of it, so I tuned into to what the guy next to me was saying. He said "Lord, take care of our wives and children back in the village. Don't let sickness come to the village. Take care of our gardens, don’t let the wild pigs get in and tear up our gardens. Take care of our hunting dogs with us here, so they don’t get killed. You know, Lord, what we’re after on this trip – all the animals in the whole jungle are yours and if you want to keep them, fine. But if you'd like to give some to us that would be good, too.”
Then he prayed for everybody down the whole line, by name. Then he got to me, who they call [Hethawoti], or Heather’s father (that’s my daughter). And he says, "Now, [Hethawoti], here, we're all down here on the ground in the dark. Teach [Hethawoti] our language so he can put your talk into our language, so we don’t have to be in the dark so we can be in the light."
I thought, “Ah! I'm the missionary, and here I am surrounded by these hunters, who are armed with bows and arrows, and they’re on their way to get some meat. And these guys are spending their very first waking moment in prayer to God, and some of those prayers are for me.”
I couldn’t help but reflect back. I was raised in a church that believed the Bible and preached it, back in Spokane, Washington. The pastors and the visiting missionaries were always emphasizing the need to “Go into all the world.” “Make disciples of all the nations.” And here I was. It says in that verse, “I am with you always, even to the end of the earth.”
I felt so blessed in the midst of these guys who had so little. At this point they had not yet one page of the Bible in their own language. No one had ever reduced their language to writing. None of them had ever been to school. There were no roads. There was nothing – just 1500 square miles of jungle, and seventeen villages spread across that remote region.
I got to know one friend back in the village, after this hunting trip. We were doing all kind things to learn the language. There were 350 people in this village of [Fugudabe]. They were all self-appointed language teachers. They assured us, “Hey, don’t worry about it. The Fotoba language is easy. Look, even the kids around here can speak Fotoba.”
I was walking up and down the village one day. I came by the porch area of a men’s house. There was a man who subsequently became my best friend. His name is [Awiawiambiari]. He motioned to me. He said “Sit down, [Hethawoti]. Sit down by my fire.” So I sat down. He says, “You know when you first came here you couldn't understand our language, so I didn’t tell you this. But now you understand our language, I want to tell you something.”
He said, “You know, some years ago there was an evangelist named Keith Abaregi, who himself was a Fotoba. But because of warfare he had to flee out of the Fotoba-speaking area, three days in the bush, and he was actually raised in another village. There was a missionary living over there. He heard the gospel. He became a Christian. And he grew as a disciple, and he became a young preacher boy, an evangelist.
“And this young man, at great risk to his own life, went back into the Fotoba speaking area and evangelized a few villages – just by himself. And [Fugudabe], this village where we lived, was one of them.”
[Awiawiambiari] said: “He told us had to go on because he was an evangelist, he had to go from village to village. ‘You're not going to get on too well on your own. Pray and ask God to send you a missionary.’”
[Awiawiambiari] said “there were only a few of us who believed the message. And we listened to the talk. And we were praying. And the unbelievers in the village would mock us. They said, “what are you doing?!”
But then you came. You and your wife and your kids. And together with you we built that house in the middle of the village, and thatched it. And when you actually moved in and started learning our language, we turned to those guys and we said, ‘See, it works.’”
I was so blessed. I had no idea what God was doing.
We went on language learning like that. Finally, on the two-way radio from the center of activity there in Papua New Guinea, the director called us up. He said, “You’ve been out there for a while. You’ve been working on analysis of the language and so on. We want you to come in now to the center and attend a beginning translation workshop. We want you to bring a couple of the people there from the village. And to get ready for this workshop we would like you to translate ten chapters of something easy like Genesis, and come in. Off and clear.”
I looked at my wife Carol, and I thought, “This is good. We can hardly put a good Fotoba sentence together, and they want us to translate ten chapters of the Bible!”
All of a sudden all the training we’d had back at the Summer Institute of Linguistics, back in Seattle, came back to me. I thought, “We took all those people’s money back in the churches in the Spokane area, and we told them we were going to be Bible translators. They sent us halfway around the world, and we built a house in the middle of these people’s village, and now, I wonder if we can really do this.” I had kind of a crisis in confidence.
So I got my Bible and I went out to what is my study out there, about 100 feet from the house. The people call it the “Bible house”. It’s only 12 feet square, and it’s thatched. It’s on the edge of a steep precipice. I began to ask God. I said, “Lord, I wonder if I can really do this?” And I looked at my Bible there and I said, “Lord, does it say somewhere in your word, where does it say here that you are going to help me do this? Or are we kind of on our own here?”
And I began to look and search, until two verses just jumped off the page when I finally found them. They’re in Hebrews, chapter 13, verses 20 and 21. God says,
“Now may the God of peace who brought up from the dead the great shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the everlasting covenant, even Jesus our Lord; equip you in every good thing to do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight."
And I thought, “That's it! Thank you. I got it. Right.” I claimed that verse, because I knew it God’s will to work together with these people, so that they could have the Word of God, and that God was going to equip me to do his will.
So, claiming that verse, we gathered together some of the eager men in the village. These guys had never been to school, mind you, and only speak the Fotoba language. And we were going to translate Genesis.
Man, did they love the book of Genesis. That is a great book. I remember when we were in chapter 3, verse 19. God had told our parents Adam and Eve, “You can eat off all these trees. But don’t eat off the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The day you eat thereof you will surely die.”
Well, you know, they didn’t listen very well, and Satan came and tempted them and they yielded and ate, and God comes back on the scene – we were working through this with a couple guys. One of them was named [Hoppite]; the other was named [Ysya]. We got to the place where God was passing out the punishments, as it were. And he says to the snake, “Now you’re going to go down on your belly and eat dirt the rest of your life.” And he gives the punishment to the woman, “I’m going to greatly increase your pregnancy troubles and so on.”
But then he gets to Adam, whom you get the sense God is holding the most responsible for this. He says, “Cursed is the ground because of you; no longer will the food just come up by itself.” “By the sweat of your face you will eat your food until you return to the ground.”
When I got to the part where it says, “By the sweat of your face you will eat your food,” I looked up at these guys sitting across the table from me. I noticed a blank stare. So I said, “[Hoppite], what does that mean to you?”
And he said, “Nothing.” He said, “What is this business about sweat on your face, anyway?”
I said, “well, what he really means is that it’s going to be by hard work.”
He said, “Oh. We don’t say that. That part about sweat on your face.”
As we talked it over, it dawned on me: in a place where it’s hot and humid and rains a lot, you can have sweat on your face, sitting on the porch. It’s not associated with hard work.
Then he said, “But there is something we do say. Do you see those gardens out there?” And he pointed out across a great valley. “Those are yam gardens. When we’re making those gardens we cut down those big jungle hardwoods. And then we lop off the branches and cut them into lengths. We roll those big logs to the perimeter of the garden, to make fences to keep the pigs out, so they don’t come in and eat all the taro and yams.
“When we’re doing that kind of work, we say ‘by busting your gut you work and raise your food.’”
I said, “Ok.” I put it in there, and read it back to him: “God said to Adam: ‘No longer will the food come up by itself, but by busting your gut you will work, and raise your food, and go on living like that, until you die and become part of the ground again.”
When I said that to these men, they all shook their heads and said, “[Moadapo],” which means “very true!” And one of them looked down at the three-ring notebook that I was working from, and said “So that’s how we got into this mess.”
And I was really encouraged.
Before we were going to go home on our first furlough to the United States, we wanted to translate John 3:16, because all we’d done is Genesis, and I knew I’d get back here, and somebody would say, “tell us John 3:16 in Fotoba.” So I thought, “It’s only one verse, so let’s try it.”
You might think it would be a very easy verse to say. It goes like this: “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Well, I couldn’t find the right word for “loved.” You would think that would be the easiest word to find. It was not. It wasn't easy at all. They have a word in Fotoba, [hinkezedapo], which is kind of like loving mango or pineapple or sugar cane.
So I asked, “What about a young man who wants to marry a young woman, what do you call that?” They said, “Oh, that’s [hosaarapo].” But after a long discussion I found that that’s a panting, erotic kind of love. That’s not the right word. And so we were still looking for this word.
Well, my wife and I had noticed that in the Fotoba language that when somebody is greeting someone else they always say, "[koneo!]". And when they've been gone for awhile and they come back to the village, they also say "[koneo!]". So we write that down – [koneo] means hello and good-bye.
And then we noticed that if someone gets seriously hurt on the trail, or they’d fall down or cut themselves with their axe, people around them would gather around them and say [koneo, konedapo]. So we wrote in there, it also means “I'm sorry.” It's an expression of sympathy.
One day, my wife Carol comes back; she comes to the house; she says: “I think I’ve found the word for love.” I was excited and said, “Great! What is it?” She says, “It’s [koneo].”
I asked, “How did you discover this?” And she said, “I've been talking with the lady next door, and she said that she had married her first husband and had all these kids. And her husband was killed in the warfare. There was this other guy - his wife died of disease and he had a couple kids too and she said, ‘[koneo], I married him. I had to marry the first guy, but this guy I married out of [koneo], out of love.’”
I said, “Well, maybe she was just feeling sorry for him.”
She said, “Oh you skeptic, no, this is it.”
So I said “Well, maybe it is,” but I didn’t really believe it at this point.
One day, there had been three or four days of nice sunshine, and they said, “Let’s go bat hunting.” So they took me along to this cave – they always invited me on these trips, because I had a flashlight. They love to hunt bats in a cave, big fruit bats. They shoot them off the ceiling of the cave with their arrows. They get really into this, going almost crazy, shooting these bats.
But I noticed they were very reluctant to cross this underground lake. There was no other way around it but to cross it. So after we got through with the hunt and got back to the village – the village is up on a ridge, high on a ridge – I asked [Hoppite], I said, “[Hoppite], I don't understand something. You guys were running around that cave, no fear. Why were you and the whole hunting party so reluctant to cross that underground lake?”
He said, “[So-Weh]”.
And I said, “What is [So-Weh]?”
He said, “You mean
who is [So-Weh].”
He said, “Haven’t you heard the legend of the two brothers?”
I said, “No.” And I turned on my tape recorder.
He began to tell me this legend: “There were two brothers and they went fishing in a certain lake. They worked at it for a while, until one got tired, and tells his younger brother, “You come down here on the raft, and I’ll get up on the shore.”
So they switched, and pretty soon, the older brother said: “Hey brother, there’s something wrong. The water on the raft has come up to your ankles. Stop fishing. Give it away and come to shore.”
So the younger brother starts doing that. And he starts paddling but it doesn't work. The water comes up to his knees and he's starting to get concerned. The older brother is really starting to panic. He says, “Come on. Don’t fool around. Give it away. What are you doing? Come to shore!”
The younger brother says, “Something has a hold of my ankles and is pulling me down.”
More pleading. More efforts, but to no avail. The water keeps rising. The older brother is just beside himself.
The water comes up to his neck. And the younger brother out there in the lake says, “[koneo]” and disappears under the water.
And the older brother runs as fast as he can back to the village, and he says “[So-Weh] has got my brother.” And they grab this big pig and they hustle it back to the edge of the lake and they kill the pig and they say, “[So-Weh], here’s your pig.” And they offer the blood and the fat of the pig into the water.”
And I said, “[Hoppite], what happened?” He said, “Nothing.” His voice became very stern. He said, “Men don’t fish in that lake anymore. Nobody goes anywhere near that lake. They don’t even make the sound of footfalls. A man-getting [So-Weh] lives in this lake.”
And I said, “[Hoppite], does everybody know this story?”
He said, “Everybody knows this story.”
“And you’re telling me that you gave this pig to [So-Weh] so he would release the brother?”
“Yes.”
“But he didn’t release him?”
And he said, “No.”
“And you never saw him again?”
“No.”
All of a sudden something clicked. I said, “[Hoppite], let's work on this little verse.” He said, “OK,” so we started working. ‘For God …’ I said, “What if we said, ‘For God had so much [konedapo] – so much [koneo] for the people of this world …’ What would that mean?”
He said “That would mean he had a lot of compassion.”
I said, “God had so much compassion for the people of this world that he gave his one and only son – not a pig – he gave his son. That whoever believed in him would not perish but have everlasting life.”
[Hoppite] shook his head. “Whoa.”
Some time later we were translating in Mark 10. There was a whole bunch of the old fight chiefs there in the Bible house. I was stumped again. We were at the point where Jesus was telling the disciples, “The son of man is going to be betrayed into the hands of sinners and they're going to mock him and spit on him and scourge him and they're going to kill him. And then three days later he'll rise again.”
I was trying to find the word for
scourge. I had never seen that done anywhere in the village. “Come on, what’s the word. Tell us what it's like.”
I said, “Well, it’s something like hitting with a rope.” They were going to take something like a leash for a pig, and they were going to hit Jesus with a rope. And I looked at their faces – blank.
So I got up. I happened to see a piece of rattan vine about this long, lying on top of the wood stove.
I walked around the table – they were all watching me – I picked up that piece of vine and I said, "Well, it wasn't exactly like this. But it was something like this." And I began to beat the top of that stove. “Wham.” “Wham.” “Wham.”
One guy says, “That's not hit with a rope. That's [foksosidapo].” I ran back around the table, I wrote that down: “[foksosidapo].”
I looked up and they were all staring at me intently. One guy leaned forward. His nostrils were flaring, and the veins were standing out on the sides of his neck, and his arms were twitching and he leaned forward and said, “Did they do that to Jesus?”
And I said, “Yeah.”
And he said, “We only did that to our enemies before we killed them.”
And they couldn't comprehend that this man that had little children on his lap and fed people and healed people that they would do that to him. And they could talk for about half an hour. What was happening in that room was that the full weight of what it cost God to love the world was becoming real to them.
And one man said “We’re dying of the deliciousness of these words.”
1. Throughout this transcript Fotoba words in brackets signify an attempt
to represent Mr. Anderson’s pronunciation of these words.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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