Again, I find myself looking at my computer screen, too awake from working, and wanting to write a blog post. I'm hoping to post my testimony sometime soon. I started working on it last week and it didn't go as well as I would have liked it. Instead, I'm going to tell you why, of all things I could do with my life, I'm choosing Bible translation.
Even at a young age, I was fascinated with foreign languages and cultures. I wondered what it would be like to speak words no body else understood or to grow up in a totally different environment than Lafayette, Indiana and Worthington, Minnesota. I loved to listen to the missionaries who were on furlough, see the countless pictures they were eager to show the congregation, hear songs for Jesus that Christians from those faraway places had written, and listen to my mother read missionary biographies to me and my siblings.
I loved to travel. I hated the idea of becoming a missionary. All missionaries went to christian schools and could only study missions and were poor and sick all the time and lots of foreign countries wouldn't let the missionaries in because they knew the schools they had gone to were christian. Missionaries only ever talked about Jesus. You had to be so good to be a missionary. I definitely wasn't good enough to be a missionary and I didn't want everything that had to do with being a missionary. How could I tell anyone about Jesus?
I went through a laundry list of different professions I wanted to pursue: Egyptologist, archeologist, artist, waitress, doctor, paleontologist, nurse, veterinary technician, writer, English teacher, and I finally settled on elementary school teacher when I started college. I wanted to be the light in a little boy or girl's life. I loved children and I wanted them to love learning as much as I did.
I didn't take any education classes my freshman year at Ivy Tech. Education classes didn't transfer; why would I take them anywhere other than my anticipated university? Summer and Fall of my sophomore year, I started taking education classes. And I hated them. I loved assisting in the school for a morning each week, but the course work, the papers, the projects, the discussions, the time I was called out for being anti-sex education were all things I hated.
That fall, I also took a linguistics class past the introduction level. I loved it. I couldn't get enough of the International Phonetic Alphabet, feature geometry, syllable trees, Arthur the Rat (so, maybe Arthur the Rat got old). Every class session was a challenge, every homework made my breath come up short, every theory was new and exciting, every homework was intriguing, my paper was oodles of fun to write. I absolutely loved linguistics.
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