“I know your brains are full, but what about your hearts?” our instructor asked as he sent us out of class to have fifteen minutes with our Savior right in the middle of a language training day. More than the curriculum, what I will take
away from the two weeks of phonetics training is having
A PLACE. A place to worship, a place to
rest, a place to prepare for
Africa, a place
to remember our call is not to missions, but to Christ.
As soon as we arrived, we started shedding layers of
exhaustion. Because the kids travel so
well, I hadn’t realized how deeply the rootlessness was affecting them. Titus’ unbridled enthusiasm at having HIS OWN
bed for the WHOLE four weeks caught me by surprise. He’s right, though. It’s been a long time since he had a real bed
that he didn’t have to share with his brother. Emily’s reaction of, “It’s a
dream come true!” was to having a closet and drawers in which to put her
clothes. Clearly, they became
“missionary kids” long before leaving the country.
The children’s program here is phenomenal. For six hours a day, all three are in their
classes learning language skills and also processing growing up in a foreign
country. The teachers are giving the
kids words to express their paradoxical childhoods and, best of all, it’s
normal here. The first day Emily said
one kid in her class described his family as “crazy” because they’d sold their
house and all of their stuff and were driving around the country preparing to
move to Africa. “That’s not crazy,” she said, “That’s just
like us.”
Our family phrase of the week: “They are drilling our
brains, but pampering our bodies.” This
program reminds me of our college days at Harding because they took away all my
real world responsibilities like cooking, cleaning, traveling, and (most of the)
homeschooling. In return, they gave me strenuous classes and homework assignments.
I love it! Plus, just like in college, the people we go
to class with are the ones we play with on the weekends, the people we eat with
in the dining room are the ones we worship with day in and day out….it’s Christian
community on steroids.
As a side note, we have learned a lot about language
acquisition in the last two weeks. With input from others, Philip and I have a
battle plan drafted for tackling West African French upon arrival to the
country. These language learning weeks
have flown by, but the overarching lesson is this: Learning French in country is not going to resemble the tortuous years I spent attempting to learn Spanish
in school. God is faithfully bringing
us into something completely new.
“Hungry I come to You
for I know you satisfy.”
Kathryn Scott
