Last Saturday night Nick & Lynne were over at our house visiting with us when some people showed up to talk to them.
In walks Indubayyo (in-dew-BYE-oh), one of the ladies from church. She begins talking rather animatedly to Nick. Lynne tells us that she's asking Nick about how the translation of Romans is coming. Nick and his team have been working on the translation of Romans for over a year now, and for the next 3 weeks Nick will be down in Nairobi working with a consultant, revising and editing what we are all praying is the final draft of Romans.
Indubayyo is a stunningly beautiful woman with an even more beautiful testimony. This woman cannot help but beam as she talks about Jesus. Indubayyo can tell you the exact verse in Mark that she read from the Rendille translation that led her to a relationship with Jesus Christ. It had such an impact on her that she named one of her children Marko..."Mark" in Rendille. Indubayyo's job as an evangelist for the church is to walk from goob to goob, sharing with them who Jesus Christ is and what it means to be a Christian. There couldn't be a more perfect job for this amazing woman.
(To read more about Indubayyo, PLEASE read this)
(Photo credit: Andy Brown, AIM On Field Media)
Everywhere Indubayyo goes she carries with her the Rendille Scriptures. I wish I had a picture of this bag and the pages she keeps tucked away inside. Her Rendille New Testament books - the ones Nick and his team have finished translating - are worn to pieces. Tattered pages, worn covers. These books have been well-loved and used often. Lynne told us she refuses to accept new books...she says that these books are too precious to replace.
Indubayyo asked Nick how Romans is coming. She cannot WAIT to for the book to be complete! A few months ago, Nick was in Nick gave her a photocopy of Romans to use when she evangelizes. Saturday night, as she was talking to Nick about the translation of Romans, I was convicted of how much I really take for granted.
Indubayyo reached into her bag and pulled out this same photocopy Nick gave her months ago. The several pages she has are tattered and falling to pieces. Indubayyo carefully and tenderly unfolded it. She treated it as if it was the most precious thing she owned.
Indubayyo, like the rest of the Rendille, is thirsty for God's word. Thirsty doesn't begin to describe what these men and women feel when they think of the Bible. Traditional Rendille culture is very much like the Old Testament. A group of people wandering around in the desert? Hello, Rendille. Sacrifices? They have those. Clean and unclean animals? Yep, they have those too. Camels? Herds of animals? Pastoralists? Check, check, and check. In fact, two of the very first books ever translated into Rendille were Genesis and Exodus chapters 1-20...because the Rendille can relate to them very easily.
But, unlike you and me, they don't have access to the entire Bible in their mother tongue. They don't have access to everything the Bible has to say about Jesus Christ being the ultimate sacrifice. Traditional Rendille like Indubayyo only speak one language - Rendille. A Bible in any other language is worthless to them. Nick and his team have been working almost thirty years on translating the Scriptures into Rendille, and it hasn't been an easy process. Before translation even began, Nick had to write down Rendille as a language. Because before Nick and Lynne came, Rendille was purely a spoken language - no one had ever written it down before.
In 30 years they've just finished 86% of the New Testament. But because it is so expensive to print, only a few books are actually available until they complete the NT and bind it all in one book.
Can you imagine your life without your Bible? In the West we have about 18 million options for our Bible. NIV? ESV? NASB? The list of acronyms could go on for days. The Message? Study Bible? Backpack Bible? Red letter Bible? Student Bible? What color do you want the cover to be? What kind of material? How about the pages? That's not even asking how many Bibles we all own. I mean, me personally, I own about 5. I don't really need 5, nor do I even know where some of them are.
Can you imagine your Bible without Romans? What a rich, heavy book. How about without the entire Old Testament? I can't even imagine. Psalms, Isaiah, Deuteronomy...gone. Ecclesiastes, Job, and Daniel are a figment of your imagination. Jeremiah doesn't even exist.
For the Rendille, anyway. Or for 2,392 other languages spoken in the world without access to ANY of the Bible in their mother tongue. The number of people that affects? 200 million.
I wish I had as much thirst for the Word as Indubayyo does.
Pray for the translation project. Pray for Nick and his team...they left for Nairobi yesterday to work with a consultant to finalize the book of Romans, or "Rooma" in Rendille. Pray for funding to continue the translation project. They are SO close to completing the New Testament!
Pray for the Rendille.
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