During our Friday Bible study, my friend N.—the amazing woman who lets us meet in her home—shares her one Zomi Bible with her husband. They are a family of seven. They have one Bible. Their children have a few English Bibles, but they have only one in the language of their hearts.
We asked her if she knew where there were Bibles in Zomi. We would be happy to help her buy some for her family and any other Zomi speakers she knew who had no Bibles. She got it in Burma, she told us. She didn't know.
Even with the internet and other Bible-finding resources at our disposal, we couldn't find any. I have a friend who knows people high up in a translation organization, with connections to other organizations. She called him, who called a guy, who called a guy. No one could find Zomi Bibles. Finally, my friend was put in touch with someone who consults on Bible translations in the Zomi-speaking area of Myanmar. He thought he might be able to find a few, but he couldn't ship them to us—they wouldn't make it through the Burmese mail system. He found someone to take them by hand across the border into Thailand, and then ship them from there. The whole time we all hoped it was the right language, and the right dialect of the language (difficult to confirm long-distance).
The search started in May. Just yesterday, N.'s family was able to hold one more Bible in Zomi. They don't have to huddle together over one copy now, trying to read at the same time. It was beautiful to see how excited they were. It was beautiful to see their seventh-grade daughter—who diligently reads her English Bible, but struggles with the vocabulary and grammar of a language she's known only a couple years—visibly moved when she opened it. It was beautiful—and humbling—to see what a huge deal it is for them to read the words of God in the language they use to think and to pray and to talk to one another.
As I've mentioned, B. and my other Jarai-speaking friends don't even have the whole Bible translated into their language. They have to read it in English or in Vietnamese, the language of the people who persecuted many of them.
I can't imagine what that's like. I admit, even as a linguist, I take it completely for granted that I have access to almost anything I want in English.
I wish I could find Bibles for all my brothers and sisters here. I wish I could speak Zomi and Jarai and Nepali and Chin and Swahili and Karenni and Ringau, and could hear their insights, and could encourage and be encouraged by them in words we all understand. I hope that they are still encouraged as much as I am when we meet together, even without a common language.
God—the God of all languages and peoples and culture—is here. He is at work. He is bringing his Word here, even in cases where you can't just hop over to the bookstore and buy a copy of it. ...I feel so honored to get to see him working.
The image at the beginning of this post is a paper cutting I did recently, based on the unity of the global Church expressed in Ephesians 4. The background of each landmass is a list of (only some of!) the living languages found in those places. (Except Greenland—it has only two languages, so I stole some of Canada's for it.)
