Serving God

Something I (Misha) was thinking about the other day is that if I were here in Tanzania to serve the translators, I wouldn’t be here. As much as I sometimes really enjoy them, sometimes they drive me absolutely crazy. After all, they are a bunch of sinners, and sinners and their sins can be pretty annoying. (I’m sure I drive them crazy at times, too, since I’m also a sinner who sins.) I have my moments when I’d like to fire them all. (Side note: I don’t have the authority to fire them and wouldn’t actually do it even if I did; I’m just saying that there are times when I wish I could.)


Something I knew before I came here is that cross-cultural relationships are difficult. The longer I stay here, the more I realize how true that is. The translators and I have our fair share of comical misunderstandings that leave us all laughing, and we also suffer through some painful episodes that could have been avoided if we were quicker to realize that the problem is one of cross-cultural miscommunication and not us intentionally hurting one another. Over the past couple years we’ve wasted a lot of energy getting upset with each other over cross-cultural misunderstandings.

So when I was thinking that my purpose here is not to serve the translators, I thought, “The Scripture we’re translating is for ALL the people of these language groups, so really it is these large groups that I’m here to serve.” But that idea quickly let me down. Sometimes if I meet a Zanaki person and tell them that I’m working to help translate the Bible into the Zanaki language they get quite excited and are appreciative of this work. But a lot of the time they don’t really care. After all, many of them are not believers, and why would a non-Christian start celebrating scripture translation all of a sudden? And some of them don’t really see the point of translating it into Zanaki, either because they don’t value scripture or they don’t value their own language. So if I were trying to encourage myself to persevere because of serving these Bibleless people groups, well, that would last about a day before I lost heart!

As for me being here to serve Wycliffe Bible Translators or the Uganda-Tanzania Branch of SIL, yes, I would hope my being here would be of service to those organizations, but that’s not my reason for what I do. Organizations and businesses, even Christian missions, let you down. They are run by imperfect people and without a doubt will fail you at some time or other.

I’m here in Tanzania because God has called me to be here and because I’m serving him. When it comes right down to it, my reason for being here actually has nothing to do with me believing in the value of mother-tongue scripture, my work with the translators, or a desire to strengthen indigenous churches. It’s about God. I’m here to obey God and serve him. If some good comes out of my being here, that’s just a bonus. If he’d like to use me to bless people with his Word in their languages, that’s great, but that’s not why I’m here. Out of obedience to him I will try to serve the translators and other people around me and my mission organization, but if I let that be my motivation for service, I’m going to run dry on motivation pretty soon. Only God can replenish me every morning to do his work!