“Tell me another story,” Leigh asks his many KaRen friends. He and his wife, Lea, are collecting third party stories, recording and analyzing them. These are stories about someone else, told from the speaker’s viewpoint.
“We have heard about house fires, snake bites, how to swallow a live lizard, the mauling of a bear, how to bury an elephant; just to name a few.” Leigh said. “It’s not about having cool stories to put in our newsletters, rather to analyze, learn and adapt our speaking to the KaRen patterns of speech.”
Missionaries Leigh and Lea Betts and their co-workers, will soon share the true stories of the Bible with the KaRen people and they want to share them in a way that truly communicates.
You can sense this missionary’s heartbeat when he adds, “Pray for us to work as hard as we can, learn as fast as we can, and love as only God can.”
Stories are the lifeblood of a missionary’s language learning toolbox. From tribal stories, missionaries learn new vocabulary, language patterns, speaking and listening cues and the cultural aspects of the people they are serving.
Do you ever think about how you tell stories? How do you emphasize the details, indicate who is speaking or make sure the listener is tracking what you are saying? It’s not just about the stories. Intentional learning is behind a every missionary’s story gathering.