Urbana: An Ongoing Experience (Urbana 81)

Testimony of a missionary
by Edgar S. Beach

A testimony of an Urbana 70 Alumnus and Bible translator in Central America

Hidden down in the rifts and hollows of the great continental divide where it crosses from Guatemala into Mexico is the municipality of Tectitán. You won't find it on too many maps and as a matter of fact, few Guatemalans have ever even heard of the place. Probably one reason for that is the terribly rugged terrain that discourages travel through the area. So most of the world passes way around Tectitan on modern highways or high overhead in sleek jets. But there is a road that goes there. Most of you probably would not call it a road though, because it's just too narrow and rutty and rocky and slippery and just too precariously hung on the side of the mountain. But nevertheless it is a road and for me it's the road home. Tonight I would like to share with you how I got on that road and a few of the things that have happened as the Lord has so graciously led me there.

When I attended Urbana 70 as a college sophomore, I honestly felt not a single hang-up about missions. After all, I had long since decided that was going to be an architect. Moreover I had never had any interest whatsoever in learning a foreign language and I only took such courses because I was forced to. Being a missionary was great if you were called to it but I wasn't and so I would just cheer them on and support them. That's how I went to Urbana 70 and that's how I left Urbana 70. But with one small change. I was so tremendously impressed with the Lordship of Jesus Christ and all that he had done for me that I felt I had to make a certain commitment to him. If he was to call me to go overseas to some "uttermost Dart of the earth" then I would go.

Of course I knew he wouldn't do that but just in case, I wanted him to know that he was indeed my Lord and that I'd go anywhere to do anything for him.

The Lord takes care of first things first though and so for the next year I really didn't think too much more about missions. He was working on things in my life like having a daily devotional time, learning how to lead a small group Bible study and sharing my faith with other students. But as time went by I kept having this nagging doubt as to whether or not I was really doing the right thing by so confidently pursuing a career in architecture. So I began to read some missionary biographies and some information about missions and I prayed about my doubts.

The Big Jolt

The biggest jolt that caused me to seek the Lord on the matter was when my girlfriend confided in me that she felt God was calling her to go overseas to translate the Bible for some group of people whose language had never even been written down. Well that was a shock! Here was the gal I thought I loved all of a sudden receiving that mysterious "missionary call" and making plans to go off to deepest darkest who-knows-where. I came to the realization that I had not been especially called by God to any vocation in particular let alone to architecture. I just wanted to do it because I was good at it and I enjoyed it. Kind of a variation on the "do-it-if-it-feels- good" theme.

I remembered what someone had said at Urbana 70 about finding God's will for your life and it was this: you can not steer a parked car. And as far as my future with the Lord was concerned, I didn't want to be found with the engine off and the keys pulled out. Nor did I want to be a backseat driver. So I decided to pray and to look more carefully into what God might have me to do even to the point of actually considering what seemed to be the most far-out possibility of all which was becoming a missionary. But, I decided that if God wanted me to change direction then he was going to have to indicate that to me in some pretty clear-cut ways because I was not going to latch on to Elenore's call claiming it for my own. He would have to call me regardless of his plans for Elenore because I was not going to go off to some steaming, mosquito-infested jungle someplace unless I had to.

It was after several months of seeking the Lord that he finally answered my prayers. It happened when I saw a film about a Wycliffe couple who had gone to live with the Aguacatec people of Guatemala. The film showed how they had learned to speak the Aguacatec language and how over the years the Lord had enabled them to translate the New Testament. In the process of helping to translate and repeatedly reading and studying God's word, first one man became a Christian and then his family and then several families and finally there was a thriving indigenous church.

When I saw that, I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that that was what the Lord wanted me to do. How? That's the big question, isn't it? How does one know positively that God is calling him or her to the mission field or anyplace else for that matter? Well I'll tell you what I thought at that time and then later I'll tell you what I've thought since then.

When I saw that film, I saw very clearly an immistakeable need and that it was possible for regular-type people to go and get the specialized training necessary for meeting that need. So I said to myself, "Hey! I could do that." But there are lots of needs in the world that one can meet. What really gripped my heart was that I too had become a Christian through reading the Bible on my own and as I watched the film I saw that exact same thing happening in far-off Guatemala. "Surely," I thought, "God did not lead me to himself in that particular way merely for my own benefit. Surely he must have wanted to instill in me a vision for reaching others in a like manner. I believe that God is calling me to Bible translation work." That was not an impulsive decision because that was the way the Lord had been drawing me through the previous months of prayer and thought and investigation.

Since God had given us the same goals in life and because our love for one another kept growing, Elenore and I decided that he was leading us together and so a year later we committed ourselves to following him as one. During our first year of marriage we made application to join Wycliffe and to take the first semester of linguistics training that they required of translators.

I guess I expected that the course would be something akin to a Christian camp session. Well it wasn't. As a matter of fact it was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life. I guess I had thought that God's will would be about as hard to swallow as marshmellows and it hadn't occurred to me that he'd ask me to sink my teeth into something pretty tough. Now of course everybody is different. We had two friends there that summer who found it all so easy that they had to look for extra work to keep from getting bored. But that was no comfort to me! Here I was, supposedly "called" by God to dedicate the next decade or two or three of my life to this stuff and I could hardly get to first base. I half wondered if I hadn't made a mistake after all.
But by the grace of God I made it through the course.

I learned to analyze the sound systems and grammars of languages that I had never even heard of before and I found that those so-called "exotic, impossible-to-learn" sounds were quite possible to learn and even fun at that. And I came to understand something of the magnitude of the task that lay before us. So it was with joy and trembling that I learned at the end of course that we were accepted as members. Our home churches were tremendously excited over how God was leading us and they were very supportive of us. So with that kind of reassurance and confirmation of God's leading we decided to press on with our training.

Laugh At Yourself

Eventually we felt led of the Lord to request assignment to Central America. Since living there would necessitate knowing some Spanish, we headed to San Jose, Costa Rica for two semesters in a language school there. Learning a second language in the cultural context of its use can be extremely stressful because it takes time to gain your social and linguistic graces.

Can you imagine for instance, a minister or an evangelist, or even a linguist for that matter, who suddenly finds that he can not express himself as well as the five-year old kid next door. That's hard on one's ego! But if you're going to learn another language, you've got to learn to laugh at yourself and to enjoy the people whose country you're a guest in and to learn to do things their way without having a defensive and critical spirit. And you've got to make up your mind that you're going to learn that language as well and as fast as you can by all means possible. I remember the day I learned the Spanish word for door. I had just come out of the supermarket and was waiting at the bus stop with my groceries. "When the bus finally came it was already full twice over. But one of the fun things about traveling on public transportation in Latin America is that there's always room for one more. So I squeezed onto the bottom step at the rear door, the bus took off and the automatic door clamped shut - right on my thumb! I was speechless.

Here I was jammed against the door embracing two gigantic bags of groceries with the bus whizzing down the boulevard and, though I was squirming and doing all manner of contortions, I just could not get my thumb out of the door. Soon I became conscious that at least a dozen pairs of eyes were staring at me wondering what in the world my problem was. .Then this fellow with an incredulous look on his face shouted out at the top of his lungs, "¡Puerta! ¡Puerta!" Suddenly the door flew open, I pulled my thumb back and a second later it slammed shut again.

I had learned the Spanish word for door, puerta, and when I finally got home, Elenore and I were able to have a good laugh about it.

With language school over, we packed our bags once again and headed for Guatemala. You can imagine our excitement when the time came to make our move out to the village of Tectitán. On a previous trip there the Lord had miraculously provided a house for us to rent. Since it was just in the process of being built, we made arrangements for it to be finished while we were gone.

When we arrived on our scheduled move-in day, the house was still roofless and far from ready. The adobe walls were up but somehow the whole thing was a bit smaller than we had had in mind. It measured a petite seven feet by seventeen-and-a-half feet which was okay. But the real problem was the height of the finished walls - a mere five-and-one-half feet. "It's safer in case of an earthquake," our landlord said. "But I'm six inches higher than the walls are," I told him. "Well," he said, "you don't have to rent the place if you don't want to." Since we had already heard rumblings that quite a few people were upset about our presence there and since we knew that there were no other houses for rent, I pretended not to hear him. "That's okay," I said. "I just happen to have some extra wood with me and so we'll just jack up the beams a bit and scrape out the floor a little more and it'll be beautiful." Reluctantly he agreed and we set to work.

Finally the day came when we moved into our little tin-roofed house. It seemed kind of romantic in a way and we hardly noticed the lack of electricity and running water or the dirt floor or how cramped we were. But what really did bother us was that after the three or four years of hard work we had put into preparing ourselves and then after traveling so far to come and help these people by giving them God's word in their own language, they didn't want it. They didn't want anything that we had to offer them. They just wanted us to go away and never come back.

Why? because they were scared out of their wits of us. It was said that we had come to steal their land, to steal their language, to poison their water, to bring disease and to eat their children. One day, one of our neighbors came over and asked us point blank, "Do you eat children?" And Elenore said, "Oh no! Do you?"

And of course no one would talk to us in the Tectitec language, since they thought we had come to steal it. "No one here talks that language," they told us in faltering Spanish. So when we asked where the people lived who did speak it, they said, "We don't -know but it must be,very far away."

Some people started saying that we were only the first of hundreds of foreigners who were going to come and take over their land. So they talked of sending a committee to the governor so that he would get rid of us. But there are always some folk who don't like committees and they said that it would never work and the only sure thing was to get a gun and shoot us.

I remember laying awake one night thinking about all this when we began to hear slow, cautious footsteps outside. After praying and waiting what seemed like an eternity, I slammed open the door and jumped outside with my flashlight blazing. And there slowly stalking across the field towards me was the intruder - our neighbor's mule.

Of course all this tension did have a very real effect on us, and as the situation went on for six months and then for a year, I began to feel rejected and depressed. fou see, our technical training had prepared us for everything - except for a spiritual battle. And we were in a spiritual battle the likes of which we had never before experienced and which I very frankly did not want to experience. My reaction was not to be thankful to the Lord as we need to be in such circumstances but rather I got angry. I was mad at the people who wanted to get rid of us, I was mad at God who just didn't seem to have a very good hand on things and I was mad at myself for being mad in the first-place.

I remember one day when the woman next door left her sheep to feed on a pile of our landlord's freshly harvested corn. Now since our landlord is a very poor man he couldn't afford to lose any of that corn so I tried to chase the sheep away. They didn't chase too easily so I decided to do what I had seen the Tectitecs do in that situation and I tossed a few small stones at the flock. When in Rome, do like the Romans do, right? Well I guess not because the woman came over and started bawling me out for trying to kill her sheep. Well I just couldn't take that kind of thing any longer so I started bawling her out. Of course she didn't understand a word of it because it was all in English and that's just as well. But she sure got the idea.

I smoldered on that for a few days before I just broke down and cried. It seemed to me that surely the Lord must never have had to deal with as bad a case as me. How much bigger of a failure could I be? Why had God ever brought me to this place? I had thought that I knew but now I wasn't sure any longer.

Called to God-sized tasks

As I searched God's Word to see what he would say to me, I eventually came to understand this: that God had not called me to an Ed Beach-sized job but rather to a God-sized job. All my life I had wanted to do just what I was good at but all my life God has wanted to do what he is good at. And what is God good at? Things like: giving life to the dead and creating something beautiful out of nothing or out of a mess. He is good at loving his enemies and he's good at planning the course of history and bringing it to his conclusion. He is good at molding so-called "pots of clay" in which to store the treasure of his all-surpassing power and glory. And he is good at guiding our feet in a path which we don't yet know but that he does. And that is why when he leads, we must follow, and not give up. You can't imagine how many times I have, in my heart, left Tectitán and never wanted to hear of the place again. But every time, the Lord brings me back and he keeps leading me on. So even though at that time I could not see why the Lord had led us there, I decided that I had to keep going, following him.

The Lord eventually gave us many friendships in Tectitán. As a matter of fact, we now have a fairly warm relationship with that woman next door who I blew up at and we have more people wanting to teach us their language than we can hire. It'd be impossible to tell you of all those who have come to our house to chat and who have told us, ''I like talking with you." Or of all those whose lives we've been able to save with a few common medicines for parasites or diarrhea or nausea. Two of our good friends have had four children, the first three of which died before we ever got to Tectitán. The last one is alive because God has repeatedly used us to save the child's life when no other medical help was available. And there would never be enough time to tell of all those who have thanked us for things we've written down in their language because now they know that their language can indeed be written and that it's beautiful and not second-rate like some people have told them.

In many ways we're still outsiders in the Tectitec community, but praise God because he is helping us to build solid friendships based on love and trust and commitment. It takes time but it's worth it because it's the context in which we can best serve people and help them to come to know the Lord and to walk with him. Let me illustrate.

When we first began to get to know our landlord, we quickly found out a number of thinggs about him, not the least of which was that he was an alcoholic. As our friendship deepened, he eventually shared with us one day how once he had tried to commit suicide but had failed and how another time he had fallen through an old footbridge and had miraculously not been killed. Well, we had just been discussing the Lordship of Christ, and had decided that it seemed like the best way to express this concept in Tectitec was through the notion of spiritual ownership. In other words, when we say in English that Jesus is our Lord, we have to say in Tectitec that Jesus is Kajawil, most literally meaning Our Owner, if we want to communicate the very same thing. So with this in mind, Elenore said to him, "Don't you understand how much God wants to be your Owner? When you fell through that bridge you should have been killed but he protected you. And even when you tried to kill yourself, he wouldn't let you. That's because he has been waiting for you to give the ownership of your life over to him." Well we talked a lot about that and that day he did give the ownership of his life over to Jesus. Things went along pretty well after that as we continued on with our language learning and translation.

But then earlier this year, there was a crisis in our landlord's life which God used to test him and to confirm again to us the wisdom of his leading us to Tectitán. One of the old men of Tectitán had just died and since he had been a friend, our landlord decided to go to the wake. One of the unfortunate parts of traditional funerals in Tectitán is that there are always some people there who consume a fair bit of homebrewed liquor. This has a lot to do with their beliefs about respecting their ancestors and so forth.

Well around midnight a fellow came up to our landlord and said, "Say there, wasn't your honorable deceased father a good friend of this honorable fellow who just died? If so, you had better offer the oldest son a drink out of respect." So our 15-month old babe in Christ found himself put on the spot and he gave in. And of course he who offers a drink must accept the return offer and with two shots our alcoholic friend was gone.

I learned about the whole thing the next morning when his wife came down and told us about it and how he had narrowly missed her with his machete when she had tried to stop him. As I ran off down the trail towards town to look for him, I was thinking of how pleased Satan must have been with the whole mess. "Lord," I prayed, "I don't know what I can do to help this man. But I want to do something because he is one of the closest friends we have in this place. If you want to use me in his life now then help me to find him and to minister to him."

Who should I meet but a minute later coming slowly down the road towards me but our landlord. "Hi," I said. "What happened?" "Nothing," he said, standing there with eyes so bloodshot that they looked like traffic lights. Well we talked and he told me what had happened and then he said "Now I can never be good enough for God." Good enough? I didn't want to believe my ears but what I had feared all along was true. Deep down inside he was still so steeped in the Mayan theology of trying to appease God that no matter how many times we had gone over the point, he still did not understand that we can never make ourselves to be "good enough" for God.

We spent some four or five hours that day together. We went back to his house where we talked, we cried, we prayed and we looked over scriptures that we had been studying, and translating and memorizing together. And as we did so, I found that I had an amazing ability to communicate with him in clear, understandable Tectitec in a way that I had never before experienced. And as we considered afresh the love and mercy of God for us sinful, never-good-enough people, it dawned on me that there was nothing, nothing else in all the world, that I would rather be doing than sitting right there in that tiny, thatch-roofed hut talking about Jesus to a friend with an aching soul and helping him to understand the Word of Life in the language of his heart.

Later, as I left his house and walked down the road home, I thought back on all that had happened in the last ten years and I couldn't help but be full of praise to God as I said, "Thank you, Lord. Thank you, because this is what you've made me for. Thank you Jesus for leading me here. And keep on leading Lord, because I want to follow you wherever you take me."

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Urbana: An Ongoing Experience (Urbana 81)

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December 27-31, 2009