The worst part is the language.
When you don't speak the same lanuage as everyone else around you, you have the mind of an adult burdened by the survival skills of a toddler. You're fully cognizant of your needs, and fully aware of how helpless you are to do anything about them, or even to articulate what they are. In the best of times, you bear this with grace and laugh at your difficulties. The rest of the time you want to run away and cry.
Eventually you learn important phrases like, "I don't speak your language." This helps, but only moderately. There are times that come too frequently when you trust this trusty phrase out only to discover that the national who is speaking to you is speaking English, and speaking it tolerably well, but they are putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable, or pronouncing a silent letter, or committing some other minor gaffe that makes their speech unfamiliar to you.
Stupidest person on earth is too mild for how you feel on those occasions. Now you don't even understand English, and what's worse, you've just insulted someone who was trying to connect with you by inadvertantly telling him that he's too stupid to speak English properly.
Go get a shovel, dig a hole and climb in. Your only hope as a missionary whose enthusiasm outpaces your mastery of the language is that the Spirit will move, and people will connect with God despite your failings.
I was a missionary in Haiti, but not the sort who did led open-air services and tried to win converts. I initially worked with STEM Ministries, which brought teams to Haiti and other countries for two weeks at a time; and then with Cradle of Life Christian School, teaching English grammar and composition to middle-schoolers.
As a result, I didn't do much preaching in Haiti, but I did try to share the gospel with a other people occasion, if for no other reason than they expected me to and I had the feeling that I should. My first conversation along those lines went something like this:
"If you accept Jesus Christ, he will take away your dogs."Bill Smith, an Assemblies of God missionary whom I knew, told me he once preached an entire sermon in Kreyol once he felt he had gained sufficient mastery of the language. The sermon went well and the Spirit evidently was moving, so he decided to take an altar call and appeal to the congregation that if anyone wanted to follow of Christ, they should signify it by raising their legs into the air and coming forward on their hands.
"My dogs? I don't have any dogs."
"Everyone has dogs, ma'am. But when Jesus forgives them, it's though you never had a dog your entire life."
He got plenty of puzzled looks, but very little response to the altar call. The Holy Spirit was quenched.
Still, my favorite embarrassing gaffe was committed by the late Dale Preiser, another Assemblies of God missionary who had left the country before I arrived. I met him once after I had returned to the United States, when he came to visit my church.
Dale had been in Haiti for a while, and was concerned that he saw a number of believers who were mixing voodoo and Christianity, and going to the voodoo priestess for help when problems arose. The word he wanted was mambo. Unfortunately, the word he used was mamba, and for three solid months he went along Highway One, using this word in his sermons.
"Stay away from the mamba," he warned them. "Mamba is of the devil. You cannot use the mamba without shipwrecking your faith and endangering the faith of others."
Mamba is peanut butter.
Still, the Spirit was moving. I am told that people were very open to this teaching, and sales of peanut butter plummeted wherever Dale went.
Copyright © 2004 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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