Saying hasta la vista to the language of the world

The only way to understand the will of God is to first speak the language of God.

Learning Spanish would be a lot easier if the teachers just spoke English the whole time.

But, you know, that kind of defeats the point.

I’ve been in Antigua, Guatemala for two weeks now doing Spanish-language immersion. For four grueling hours every weekday I participate in a small class of students from around the world of varying ages and stories. I am learning alongside a 56-year-old man from Virginia who wants to speak to his coworkers better, a 23-year-old woman from New Zealand who has taken an extended holiday to find herself, and a 28-year-old Dutch woman who is here with her German boyfriend to experience all that Latin America has to offer before settling down in new careers.

All of us are here for fun and adventure, but more specifically, to learn Spanish.

And this is Spanish immersion—which means they throw you into the deep end of the pool and THEN teach you how to swim. It’s incredibly hard work. Our native Guatemalan teacher knows a little English but tries to keep things as strictly Spanish as possible. For someone like me who has very little training in foreign languages (literally have no idea how I passed Elementary Greek 1 & 2 with a B in college), it’s incredibly difficult.

My brain has been stretched in ways it hasn’t been stretched before, or at least since I first learned to talk. It’s been uniquely challenging. And it’s always good for me, occasionally, to be the dumbest guy in the room. It’s quite humbling…

Yeah, that’s literally the view right outside my classroom this week. You jealous?

While I’m a learning addict, even I struggle to get past that initial hump where you are lost, clueless, and frustrated. I’m a teacher, I get it, that failure is to be expected at the start of a new skill—sometimes even encouraged!

But Spanish is still easier than switching off human nature to align with God’s vision.

As humans, we’ve fallen short of our expectations—didn’t meet our quarterly goals for the past millennia. We consistently go against God’s plan and go at it on our own, usually to our own detriment.

In Romans, Paul discusses how evident God’s truth is but how willfully people just ignore it. We won’t get into the ins and outs of Natural Theology, but it will suffice to say that Paul is convinced that it’s pretty stinking obvious, even without Scripture in front of you, that there is a higher power who has some moral demands of us.

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

-Romans 1:18-20

These crazy people “did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God” (Romans 1:28) so God shrugged and gave them over to what they wanted in the first place: pure gratification of their flesh. Paul paints a vivid picture of how bad these people are for rejecting the knowledge of God and refusing to follow God’s system.

And then, in a move that one of my professors in college called “the greatest literary judo move of all time,” Paul says that the terrible picture he was painting… is a self-portrait of his readers! He chastises them for thinking they are hot stuff and for judging others when they are just as bad. Even the great Christians in Roman have an issue with turning away from God and toward their own gratification.

We don’t have time to exegete all of Romans, but the whole book can be summarized as a plea to listen to the knowledge of God, not the “knowledge” of the world. Toward the end of the epistle, Paul writes the famous verse:

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

-Romans 12:2

He is calling for a mind change. An upgrade to our thinking. The word for transformation is related to our word for metamorphosis. We are caterpillars that need to become butterflies.

In other words, we need to learn a whole new language.

In Guatemala, very few of the locals speak English. In most of my travels, I’ve been able to get by with English. Many in Europe speak English and in Belize, English is the official language. But in Guatemala, it’s a different story. To get around, I need to speak and understand the local tongue if I want to accomplish much of anything.

It’s super hard work to shift my thinking to a new language—to remember that words are all gendered now and that adjectives come after nouns and that there are like 45 different ways to say “are” and “that” depending on context. It really requires a whole renewing of my mind to comprehend it all.

All of us have gotten used to one language—the language of “ourselves.” The language of DIY. The language of instant gratification and pleasure. All of us speak that tongue naturally, not just the bad guys “out there.” But God asks us to learn a new language, which is admittedly difficult. It’s not our native tongue.

But with this new tongue, we get some excellent perks. Namely, to be “able to test and approve what God’s will is.” That’s pretty sweet! To understand what God wants us to do means we have to first have our minds so transformed that us and God are intimately simpatico.

I had a person last year tell me they felt “at peace” about a situation that’s six-ways-to-Sunday against what God would want, so thus they interpreted it as a-okay with God. When we haven’t had our minds renewed by God in the first place, we mistake the will of God for what we wanted all along. It’s like God is speaking a foreign language to us but we only know a few vocab words so we completely misunderstand the assignment (this has happened to be plenty of times in Guatemala). Pro tip: if you and God ALWAYS agree on things, you might be grossly misrepresenting God.

I am learning Spanish so I can complete my dream of traveling to every Latin American country and to better connect with my Spanish-speaking students and parents when I return to teaching. But I am a student of the Language of God so that I can better discern what God wants me to do in my life. That’s for more important.

Spanish takes a lot of work memorizing your different teners and hacers and such, but the study method for the language of God is a much more difficult project. You “study” for this test with the super-duper simple task of offering your “bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God” (Romans 12:1). You study by completing surrendering your old language and replacing it with the new one.

Yeah, not easy.

But there is no other way to understand the will of God than by transforming our lives so we can speak the same language as our Creator.

Question of the Week

Leave your answer in the comment section below or reply to this email.

How do you practice “renewing your mind” on a daily or weekly basis?

My “Goings On”

• I’m still in Guatemala. Not as productive as I’d hoped.

Adios amigos,

Jake Doberenz

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