My high school, like most, had a foreign language requirement for graduation. Like many I chose to take two years of Spanish and like many I passed rather easily. A good portion of high school students would tell you that high school Spanish is not rocket science, you do your note cards and memorize some vocabulary and boom, easy A. So years later when I went to college I decided to further my language pursuits by working towards a Spanish minor. However, the question that lingered in my mind was why? Why was I working so hard towards Spanish? Do I really care that much? Am I learning Spanish simply to follow in my mother’s Spanish Major footsteps? Or am I learning because of those summers I spent in Guatemala? Well something happened recently that finally gave me my answer.
You see I’ve been in New Orleans for a few weeks working with the North American Mission Board’s Generation Send program, a program that sends groups of college aged young adults to cities all across North America for mission and church planting work. Part of our responsibilities is working with small church plants all around our city. One such church had us canvassing nearby neighborhoods and inviting people to register their kids for a free football camp. I was in a group of three, and we were going about our business, knocking on door after door and handing out informational flyers. This all seemed like a typical day for me until we came to this one house. A woman answered the door and we said hello and began our short, well-rehearsed spiel. We could manage to get all information out in a manner of 30 seconds and be well on to the next house confident that we had conveyed our point; except not with this woman. This woman just continued to stare at us. She then revealed to us that she could not speak English and I froze in my tracks. I began to try to recall what Spanish I knew and tried to convey the message on the flyer across to the woman. None of it seemed to stick with her. She at this point probably thought I was a babbling psycho with my incoherent ramblings. However, she hadn’t left yet. So I took a deep breath and apologized for how terrible I was at Spanish. She laughed and began to listen again. This time, something crazy happened. I began to walk her through the pamphlet one line at time using Spanish I knew to roughly outline what everything meant. She felt confident that she knew what I was talking about and wished my team a good afternoon shortly before closing her door.
“God, give me words to speak and speak through me.”
A common prayer I’ve been taught to say ever since I was a child. A prayer that represents how God can speak through us and provide us with proper means of communication. What I always assumed it meant was that God will make the words pop into my head at random, (which he could no doubt do), but what I failed to realize is that God had given these words to speak much much earlier. The lessons I learned in High School and College Spanish carried me through my conversation with this woman. So now I realize that not only is Spanish a beautiful language that I get the privilege to learn, but it’s also a tool for God to use through me. Having access to an entire other language provides opportunities for potentially millions to come to know the Gospel. And those are the reasons I feel I should continue to learn Spanish, millions of unique and beautiful reasons.
