Half the World is Here

            I suppose that half the world does trudge though Nazareth on their tour buses, but I’m actually talking about a combined living and dining room in a couple’s house in Nazareth Illit (Upper Nazareth, the predominately Jewish town next door) that is turned into a church every Friday night.  They pulled out chairs from underneath their stairs to add to their regular furniture (they’d moved their dining room table someone else for the occasion).  This church serves Christians who are from a Jewish background, who wouldn’t normally go to an established local church down the hill in regular Nazareth because they don’t speak Arabic. 

            And then people came flooding in.  At least forty people, but all split into different groups for the purpose of translation.  One group was for the Spanish-speaking immigrants from various parts of South America. Another was for Russian-speaking immigrants from Russia and various other countries in the former USSR.  A smaller group was for those who didn’t speak the other languages but speak Hebrew pretty well, including some Arabic speakers who also know Hebrew.  Then there was my group, the smallest, made up of English speakers, and no two of us were from the same country.  Hence the remark that half of the world is sitting in the room.

            The man whose house we were at preached a sermon, but it took a bit longer than your traditional sermon.  He paused every phrase or so for the translation.  It was perhaps it bit chaotic, with this man preaching while the translators finished their sentence in a quieter voice, with several languages all being muttered at once.  But it was quite beautiful in a messy sort of way because it reflects God’s desire for the church: that it be made up of people from every tongue and tribe and nation. 

At the end they did prayer requests.  This isn’t really feasible in a large church, but it was small enough that everyone sort of knows each other.  If someone who speaks Russian had a prayer request, she would speak in Russian, then the Russian translator would translate into English, then everyone else would translate the English into the other languages. 

            I grew up in a fairly multi-national church in the United States, so I’m used to singing in different languages and occasionally hearing conversations in a strange language.  But this was something else entirely, because there wasn’t even a common language that everyone understood.  There is time to socialize afterwards, and trying to talk to people is difficult.  Some speak English, but many don’t.  I should probably brush up on my high school Spanish (who knew that would be useful in Israel?), and I’d like to learn some Hebrew as well because most people speak some Hebrew.  Still, I think some conversations shall have to wait to for Heaven, because I can’t learn every language in the six months I’m here.