This week, we have
another story from Rita Vernoy. She and her husband are missionaries in
Paraguay. She blogs at http://ritaloca.blogspot.com.br/. They went to language school in Mexico for a
year before going to Venezuela as missionaries.
They had to leave Venezuela due to political turmoil and are now serving
the Lord in Paraguay.
When they first
arrived in Venezuela, Rita’s husband took the pastorate of a church. This meant that he had to prepare four
sermons a week. His Spanish was decent,
but he still had to put a lot of effort into sermon preparation.
One Sunday, he stood
to preach on the subject of “Pride.” He
had a three-point outline and had put a lot of effort into preparing the
sermon. For thirty minutes, he preached
about pride. He told the congregation to
search their lives for pride. He told
them that there is no place for pride in the Christian’s life. It was a very challenging message.
The problem was that
the congregation was not responding appropriately. Many of the people had big smiles, and some
were trying not to laugh out loud. Some
looked at their feet during the entire sermon. The adults kept their laughter
contained, but the children were laughing.
Rita’s husband was so
discouraged with the spirit of the congregation. He knew that God had wanted him to preach on
pride, and he did not understand the problem with the people. Rita had to break it to him gently that instead
of preaching on pride, which is “orgullo” in Spanish, he had used the word
“ardilla,” which is the Spanish word for squirrel. The mental picture that those people were
getting would have been quite funny – Christians hunting out and killing
squirrels, God hating squirrels, and Christians not having room for squirrels
in their lives!
The following week,
her husband did not even want to preach.
He was embarrassed about his sermon from the week before. However, he was the pastor; so, he had to
swallow his “squirrels” and preach anyway!
Thank you for sharing
that story with us, Rita!
If you have a
language blooper or a funny story that you would like to share with us, please
e-mail them to me at lo@consfords.com. Please include the name of each family member, your field of
service, and a picture of your family if possible.
Until next week, keep
your sunny side up!
This one made our whole family laugh hard!
ReplyDeleteLaughing, but with tears in my eyes. Oh yes! Been there . . . not much with my husband, but I have certainly made some whopping mistakes in Spanish. Once, I was teaching a "Christian charm course" for our young ladies. I told them about face cream and how moisturizing can help them to keep from having wrinkles in the future. The girls looked at me in horror! I had said "verrugas" which means "warts" instead of "arrugas" which means "wrinkles." A simple slip of the tongue!
ReplyDeleteI think maybe the Lord used the squirrely sermon on the pastor. :o)