Preaching in Polish
It's like the holy grail...talked about a lot among missionaries but so inaccessible, so elusive. There are certain things that we missionaries like to use to gauge our journey as "real missionaries". I think that sometimes this life is just so difficult and unstable (ever-changing) that we don't have a lot to hold onto...we don't have much that allows us to evaluate ourselves and our lives as we did in the states. So, we find these indicators and setup a sort of hierarchical structure that evaluates our "indigeousness"...the level at which we've integrated into our host culture.
This is a question that gets asked pretty often among our colleagues..."have you preached in Polish yet?" For those who have it sometimes feels like they feel they've "made it" and the others of us who have just used translation are still green...we're the newbies that will make it someday (just keep prodding along little camper). If you're curious a few other indicators might be if you have swapped your lunch and dinner meals (Poles eat a much larger lunch than dinner), if you drink gas water, if you routinely cook Polish food at home, if you are always forgetting English words and fill in the gaps with Polish words (the more English you forget the higher you score in the missionary test), etc.
So, I'm just posting today to officially announce my candidacy for pres...oops, wrong speech. I'm announcing that I have officially preached in Polish. I was encouraged by my friend and pastor Tomek to give it a whirl and surprisingly, it went pretty well. You see, Polish is a beast of a language. Its barrage of changing endings (for both verbs and nouns) wreaks havoc on most peoples' minds...just think of trying to wade through about 150 ways to say "go"! And what took me all of about 1 year of Spanish to do took me over 3 years of Polish...and that's with 2 years of daily instruction and living with three Polish kids!! It's really crazy.
But now I've made it. I guess I'm in the club, however I'm still waiting for my decoder ring. Maybe it's time to make a change...start drinking the nasty gas water and swap our meals. Or maybe we're not quite ready...I don't know. Big decisions.
Amazing how we can miss the point of it all, isn't it?! It is hard to be a missionary. Of course it's hard to be anything but life, in general, is difficult and challenging. I just wish we could find other ways of feeling good about ourselves that don't create ridiculous scales and hierarchies that only tend to strain relationships and keep us from experiencing the kind of community and comradery that we could have together.
Well, I think this ends my morning of cynicism and sarcasm. I'm going to get a glass of water.
This is a question that gets asked pretty often among our colleagues..."have you preached in Polish yet?" For those who have it sometimes feels like they feel they've "made it" and the others of us who have just used translation are still green...we're the newbies that will make it someday (just keep prodding along little camper). If you're curious a few other indicators might be if you have swapped your lunch and dinner meals (Poles eat a much larger lunch than dinner), if you drink gas water, if you routinely cook Polish food at home, if you are always forgetting English words and fill in the gaps with Polish words (the more English you forget the higher you score in the missionary test), etc.
So, I'm just posting today to officially announce my candidacy for pres...oops, wrong speech. I'm announcing that I have officially preached in Polish. I was encouraged by my friend and pastor Tomek to give it a whirl and surprisingly, it went pretty well. You see, Polish is a beast of a language. Its barrage of changing endings (for both verbs and nouns) wreaks havoc on most peoples' minds...just think of trying to wade through about 150 ways to say "go"! And what took me all of about 1 year of Spanish to do took me over 3 years of Polish...and that's with 2 years of daily instruction and living with three Polish kids!! It's really crazy.
But now I've made it. I guess I'm in the club, however I'm still waiting for my decoder ring. Maybe it's time to make a change...start drinking the nasty gas water and swap our meals. Or maybe we're not quite ready...I don't know. Big decisions.
Amazing how we can miss the point of it all, isn't it?! It is hard to be a missionary. Of course it's hard to be anything but life, in general, is difficult and challenging. I just wish we could find other ways of feeling good about ourselves that don't create ridiculous scales and hierarchies that only tend to strain relationships and keep us from experiencing the kind of community and comradery that we could have together.
Well, I think this ends my morning of cynicism and sarcasm. I'm going to get a glass of water.
posted by Michael Shattuck at
2:34 AM
2 Comments:
Ha Ha Ha...your use of "nasty" in describing woda gazowana made me laugh. While I was in Poland, my partners and I got very good at stressing NIE-gazowana.
Yeah that's one of those early lessons huh? But several people I know have taught themselves, for some reason, to like the stuff. They say "oh, it's an acquired taste." What I want to ask, though, is why acquire it? Oh well, that's why I don't score higher on the test. ;-)
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