I have more sympathy, now, for people in foreign countries who can’t speak the language. It’s frustrating, let me tell you. And I realize that I don’t know the half of it; I still usually have an English-speaker within range. But it’s a very pathetic, awful feeling to just have to sit there and smile and look stupidly at someone, having so many things you’d like to say but not being able to come up with a single one that they could understand.

“Hi! How are you?” They gush sweetly at you.

“Good! And you?”

“Good!”

You search your brain for another conversation topic, then whip out, “What’s your name?” They tell you, and you tell yours, and there it ends. No “nice to meet you!” or “have a nice day!” or any such nicety. Just another smile, a nod, and possibly an out-of-place “good morning” if you can remember that.

That’s the kind of relationship I have with the cleaning ladies here. Silienne and Nonaise are precious ladies who come bubbling into our room in the mornings to sweep and mop, clean the bathroom, and make the beds. (Don’t worry; we do make our beds. But the cleaning ladies do it too, all perfect-like.) They come in wearing their cleaning uniforms, charming cotton dresses with white aprons and headscarves, and they always greet us with such warmth and excitement that you’d think we were old friends. Truth be told, the total of all the conversations we’ve had over the last two weeks is probably quite a bit shorter than this paragraph. They speak no English.

Nonaise is older, perhaps in her 40’s, rather short and heavy set; she wears a light mint-colored dress. She has four pitit, or children, from what we can gather. Silienne’s dress is orange, and she looks just beautiful in it, with her wide, beaming smile and sparkling dark eyes. She is younger and thinner than Nonaise, and is the oldest of several children. I think she might also have a child of her own. She has agreed to help in learning Creole, so we usually have a short little conversation when we see each other, sometimes centering on the question of whether she can help me learn (one of the only questions I know how to ask) and ending with her repeating a smiling statement several times to a helpless, shrugging me but probably thinking that these crazy Americans must not be too bright, after all.

I’m getting a little taste of what it feels like to want to talk to someone, want to show interest in their world, and tell them about Jesus, and be unable to. Definitely gives some motivational push to the idea of language learning. And a fresh gratitude for what language I can speak. It’s nice to be able to communicate.

Speaking of language, I think about my friends at the deaf school in Mexico, and the process of translating into sign language. In pondering this the other day, I gained a fresh wonder and appreciation for what Jesus did when He came down to earth. You see, translating into sign is so much more than just transferring words in a dictionary from one language to another; you have to actually take a thought and make it understandable to a person from, in many ways, another world. Kind of like converting energy: you can’t just plug your toaster into a waterfall and expect it to toast your bread, no matter how much energy might be present. First you have to convert it into a format it can understand: electricity.

That’s what Jesus did; He was the Master Translator. He not only gave us His Words in the language that we speak, but He showed it to us, lived it in our world. He translated the mind-blowing idea of God into something we could see and, at least partially, understand. Amazing.

But then there’s another layer to this. We, those who have received the translated message and have that very God living within us, are now translators to those around us. If all goes according to plan, the people in our little worlds—our family, our work, our schools—they should be

reading the message in their own language

when they look at our lives.