linda
A Surprising Linguist
Linda gave her heart to Jesus when she was nearly five years old, and she’s been following His heart ever since—wherever that takes her. She lived overseas from age two to six. “My brother spent his first four birthdays in four different countries,” she says. She has vivid memories of other cultures:
~ Going on German volksmarches, in which she walked through pine forests using a walking stick.
~ Living in Liverpool, England, with its hazy rain.
~ Buying kilts in Scotland.
~ Playing in a bamboo playhouse a gardener built for her in Bangladesh.
Her most vivid memories come from Bangladesh, where her family skirted rice paddy borders to go to a local church. “I saw dokans (market stalls), people eating and spitting beetle-nut juice, and shacks of plastic and metal barely holding together,” Linda says. As much as she loved Bangladesh, though, Linda hated learning its language—Bengali. In fact, she ran away from the class, saying it was just too difficult.
For the most part, though, Linda loved her young life, experiencing many diverse cultures around the globe. But she dreaded leaving each place. “The hard part is the ripping feeling in your heart when you’re always saying good-bye,” she says. “The sorrow is never knowing when or if you will see a playmate again.”
When Linda’s family returned to the United States, they still embraced many cultures. “We used to joke that our house was IHOP—International House of People. Our guest book is full of unique names and languages, and my mom’s recipe box resembles the index of an international atlas.”
In high school, Linda organized a Teens For Life group, recruiting volunteers and teaching students about infanticide, abortion, and euthanasia. When the group focused on sexual purity, Linda stood in front of the student body and expressed her commitment to remain abstinent until marriage. “The hardest audiences were the students at my own high school,” she says. “I couldn’t just stand in front, speak, and then go home. I had to go to school with them every day.”
After high school, God spoke to Linda through her parents. One summer after college, a graphic design and writing firm in Manhattan offered her a job. Linda envisioned herself in the job, living in the big city and enjoying a three-month stint in sunny Manhattan. But her parents wanted her to spend one summer at home, since she’d been away two others on overseas trips. Linda turned to Proverbs, specifically chapters 4 and 5, which talk about the wisdom of parents. She chose to heed their advice, letting the Manhattan job go.
When Linda found a job at home, it was a clerical position, filing and stapling papers. Still, Linda says, “One year later, I could look back and see the faithfulness of God’s hand. My grandmother went home to heaven the next May, so the summer at home was the last time I could have spent with her.”
The following summer, Linda worked for Trans World Radio in their studios in Russia and the Ukraine—a job far better than the Manhattan position.
After graduating from Dallas Theological Seminary, Linda spent two weeks in the Middle East. “I prayed God would give me open eyes and ears to see and hear those who needed Jesus’ love,” she relates. “I never expected to be invited to spend the night in an ethnic village, very close to a tense political border. There were times when I wondered what might happen to me there, but Jesus was right beside me. He provided three distinct times when I could tell the villagers about my belief in Jesus.”
Linda’s next life adventure will be Bible translation in Asia. She will train nationals to translate the Bible into what she calls their “heart language—a language that someone has spoken since he was a child, the language he laughs, cries, and prays in.” She believes native believers are best equipped to translate the Bible since they are experts in their own language and culture.
Linda will spend time learning a national language as well as other minority languages. Veteran translators will mentor her. Once she completes both phases of training, she’ll venture out to a culture that is yet to have a Bible translated into words they can read and understand.
Linda spends her training days in Asia learning about the culture, something her parents taught her to do from an early age. She lives in a high-rise apartment with no oven and no elevator. Just crossing the busy street has its own cultural and safety issues. “I must envision a host of winged guardians each time I pass the four-lane highway to get to the next bus stop,” she says. “To cross the road, you must inch your way out of traffic, waiting for a cluster of pedestrians to form. Once your pedestrian cluster is large enough, you all move out—forcing the traffic to slow down. Voila! You, the angels, and the other pedestrians have crossed the street! Riding a bike requires the same trust.”
One day in the country, Linda was invited by a local family to have some tea. The father offered Linda and her friends seating on handmade bamboo stools. He boiled the water as a courtesy for the visitors—to kill the bacteria—and offered it to them in rice bowls. The man’s wife roasted sunflower seeds for the guests. In a letter back to the States, Linda described what happened next. The father “brought out a book. We were amazed! That book was the [New Testament] in their minority language. It seems that we had stumbled upon relatives, who had been part of the BIG family for twenty years!”
From Germany to Bangladesh, from England to the Middle East, from the United States to Asia, Linda has seen God’s kingdom expanded. And now she’s in the midst of expanding it further by God’s grace, in a region unfriendly to Christianity.
Linda smiles, remembering God’s paradoxes. “The irony and beauty of God’s ultimate purpose is clear when I think about how I ran away from my Bengali language class saying, ‘It’s too hard.’ I didn’t study Bengali after that. Now, God uses me as a full-time linguist.”
Linda has learned that with God anyone can find a way.
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
(Philippians 2:3-4)