Two women cross the road in the town of Maroua, Cameroon. Nearby, a Wycliffe translation advisor working with the Hdi language noticed that all verbs end in either i, a or u, which changes the meaning, but the word for love, ‘dv-‘, didn’t have a version ending in ‘u’. He asked the Hdi translation team about it. “Could you ‘dvu’ your wife?” Everyone laughed. “Of course not!  If you said that, you would have to love your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water, never made you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would be compelled to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say ‘dvu’ about anything. It just doesn’t exist.” He sat quietly for a while and then asked, “Could God ‘dvu’ people?” There was complete silence for three or four minutes; then tears started to trickle down the weathered faces of these elderly men. Finally they responded. “Do you know what this would mean?! This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, millennia after millennia, while all that time we rejected His great love.”
The New Testament in Hdi is now ready to be printed and 29,000 speakers will soon be able to feel the impact of passages like Eph 5:25:  “Husbands, ‘dvu’ your wives, just as Christ ‘dvu’-d the church…” Please pray for the Hdi as they receive God’s word for the first time.

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Photo: Zeke Du Plessis. Access this image on Skip.
Words: Bob Creson