July 20 | Moments Almanac | Language

Welcome to Moments Almanac for July 20th. I hope you're well and I thank you so much for joining me today. On a small farm outside Valparaiso, Indiana, a girl was born who would one day carve a language out of nothing. Her name was Marilyn Laszlo. She grew up walking behind a plow and somewhere in those long rows while helping her parents work the fields. She told God she wanted to be a missionary. It was a promise that would carry her a long way from Indiana. In 1965, Marilyn joined Wycliffe, Bible Translators, and studied linguistics at the University of Oklahoma. A few years later, she and another translator traveled by dugout canoe up East Sipic River in Papua New Guinea to a village called Honna. The Sipic Iwam people numbered about 2,500. They had no written language. Their history included headhunting, sorcery, and deep suspicion of outsiders, and they had never seen anyone who looked like Marilyn Laszlo. She stayed anyway. There was no alphabet to begin with. So she and her partner built one from the sounds they heard, word by word, syllable by syllable, mistake by mistake. Before there was paper to spare, Marilyn carved words into banana leaves. Five years into the work, her translation partner accepted another assignment, but Marilyn remained. She kept living in Honna, learning the language from the inside out. Twenty five years later, in 1990, she completed the New Testament in a language that had never existed in written form. The Sipikiwam people had their own name for it. They called it Papa God's Carving. When the New Testament was dedicated the following year, it did not remain hidden in one remote village. Men once considered too isolated and too dangerous for outsiders to reach, traveled across the world with Maryland to tell their story. Some even stood on the platform with Billy Graham. Marilyn kept telling the story too, visiting churches and colleges, reminding people what patient obedience can build in a place most of them could never find on a map. She remained connected to the Hoana people for nearly fifty years. By the time Alzheimer's disease slowed her in 2012, she had already spent a lifetime proving what one quiet, ordinary yes could become. She died in twenty twenty one at the age of eighty-eight, only a few miles from the Indiana farm where her journey had begun. But in Juana, on the other side of the world, the village did not mourn quietly. They observed a five day mourning ritual, covering themselves in mud as they grieved the woman who had once been the strangest person they had ever seen and had become family. No one in Indiana in nineteen thirty three could have imagined that a farm girl's promise whispered while walking behind a plough would still be echoing beside a river in Papua, New Guinea nearly ninety years later. The apostle Paul wrote, Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord's work, knowing that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. Marilyn Laszlo spent twenty five years translating words many people would never read for people most of the world would never meet. To some, it may have looked painfully slow, but the kingdom of God often grows at a pace of faithfulness. Now true, most of us won't carve an alphabet out in the jungle, but all of us have a hova, a person, a place, a task nobody else wants. Waiting for someone willing to stay long enough to matter. And that's today's Moments Almanac for July 20th. I hope you'll join me tomorrow. Until then, take care. Notice the scattered moments and share the grace.