talking …. is good!

Even as I was preparing to come here to Bulgaria, I was thinking about how vital it is to have at least a bit of language, but even more so now that I’m here and have only bumped into a couple of people with the tiniest amount of English. It’s hard for an extrovert not to be able to talk! At the same time though I’ve been blessed to sit back and listen to David and Kathryn communicate fluently over and over again. I don’t think I ever was THAT fluent in my other language! An incident last Sunday really highlighted the value of good language acquisition.

We went out to visit an American family, and it wasn’t long before their Turkish neighbour was knocking on the door. Of course she was invited in, and chatted, and chatted and chatted. All sorts of topics; about me, Australia, her sons …. until at one stage poor Kathryn (who isn’t an extrovert) was obviously out of ideas of what to say. Thankfully at that point David came back into the room and took over – he IS an extrovert and never short of something to say. I made an exit to toast marshallows and chat in the next room with our host. We could overhear the conversation turning to spiritual things, we could hear them singing and praying and reading from the Bible, but it wasn’t until we were in the car going home that David said the last hour of conversation was the best … they discovered that this lady has recently become a believer, and Turkish believers are rather rare! If they hadn’t had the language to persist in conversation for the four hours or so, David and Kathryn wouldn’t have found out the extent of her new faith and be able to encourage her in it.

~ by rjp0103 on December 28, 2008.