Lost in Translation

Translation...

Its a word that keeps coming to mind. I spent a week in Germany, an invalid for my lack of language. And yet, even as I spent the days, some farmiliar bridges appeared - a word which is similar in English, a patient translator, a picture, some context - and I began at some point to recognize a favorite quote of mine:

The things that we have in common far outweigh the things that divide us (Walt Disney)

I'll be in Mexico next week. Only for 3 days, but it will be seen whether my years of toil over that language will return to me, as they did a couple years ago in Costa Rica. Maybe if grace could find me in German, such study - be it ages since - will be blessed in Mexico?

But this word keeps finding its way into my head - in English. It is in my own native language that I most frequently find a need for "translation". It is not in some foreign tongue where I typically struggle for a word, or for some combination thereof by which I might express my heart. I walk away from an encounter with a friend, and suddenly a turn of phrase echoes in my mind from a different perspective - I find myself hoping that they didn't "take it the wrong way". Email, text message, even this blog - I am buried in words, haunted by my lack of them, even among so many... fearful that one will be lost or changed as it leaves my head & finds its way in a world of perspectives not my own.

It's not only as it pertains to matters of the heart. How will my thoughts at work be perceived? What motives will be attributed to me? If I teach somewhere, what part of what I send out lands just as I intended on those who hear me? What experiences lie behind them, which translate me differently than I could ever know? As my children become such reasonable people, how will they regard my intentions towards them - my rules, even the freedoms I allow them?

And what of those experiences which are wholly "other" from my daily life? A Castle in Schwerin, a connection at summer camp, service to an orphan in Israel, or even a special, intimate time with the Lord - out of which I must go make dinner... How does all this settle - how does it translate back into the world of the mundane? These particular cases, I find, must make their home in me - they must carve themselves out a place of permanence. Is it in my "heart"? my memory? some electrical synapse in my brain? It is the place in me which makes me, me. But even in this most intimate & personal of places, some translation is needed.

My prayer becomes known: That the same Helper would serve both within and without; that the One who must so often translate me to me, would also be active in translating me to the world around me. That He would search me and know my heart, my inmost thoughts, that as He leads me in the everlasting way, He might lead me among friends and strangers in a way that protects us all from wrong perspectives. Even as I pray, another word comes to mind.

Incarnation... a very specific kind of translation...

The wild and amazing lengths to which He went in order to provide this Helper... the condescension He embraced in order to translate His very Self to me...
I come to think its not too much to ask, I come to a place of rest instead of striving, a place of trust instead of fear.
I am safe, I am valuable, I am loved, no matter what... whether I see it, whether anyone else sees it, it is true...

Truth translated – over my twisted, dysfunctional inner monologue that would scream otherwise – to a place deeper than any the world could reach. It is this which builds my conviction of things not seen.