What language barrier?

You would think that after living here for almost 7 years that our Portuguese would be pretty slick. Honestly we can talk to anybody about anything but we do have some short falls that will be with us forever.

Being that we were adults when we began to learn this language, our brains can't seem to convince our mouths to speak without an accent. We can't tell you how many times people have heard just a couple words come out of our mouths and they immediately want to know where we are from. None of our kids have accents. The Brasilians all talk about how impressed they are that our kids speak with no accent. We love our kids but in this area they make us want to puke. I admit it, we are jealous. For the kids, however, speaking Portuguese is as easy as speaking English. Again, I want to puke.

Another thing that still gives us fits is the occasional brain freeze when we are speaking. We know a certain word but something else comes out of our mouths.

Two examples from today.

We are getting ready to move into a different house (more on that later) and so we are doing all the things that need to be done for that to happen in the next couple of weeks.

Our new house is a little bit smaller and won't hold all of our things, so we are going to have to rent some storage space. Today Benay called about some space. She had talked to the man last week and wanted to recheck the space and prices. She asked about the quote he gave her on the 300 square meters of storage space. He told her he only had one space like that and the price was about R$3000 (about $1500). Benay froze. Then it dawned on her that last week they spoke of a place that had 30 square meters. Big difference. She basically was asking for a storage place of around 3200 square feet.

Later, I spoke with a friend who has a big moving truck. I asked him if we could borrow his truck on a certain day to move all of our stuff. The words for buildings and furniture are almost the same. Only one letter is different. Guess which one came out of my mouth? That's right. So what I asked him was if it would be possible to borrow his truck so that we could literally put our house in it to move to the new place.

We are blessed with great friends who either playfully laugh with us at our slip ups at times or will lovingly correct us. Even Brasilians we don't know treat us with respect as we make language mistakes.

A great thing about living in another country is it actually strengthens your Christian life. How? Just with the language learning alone. The Bible repeatedly speaks of humility. Learning a new language and living in a new country trying to speak that language will definitely humble you as you have to be okay with making mistakes and sounding, at times, like a complete moron.

This verse came to Benay`s mind one time when she was feeling inadequate to do this job with her language skills:

"Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. " 1 John 3:18

It's pretty cool to see how many doors have opened for us to share Christ's love through our flawed language. Just the "where are you from" comment is, we feel, an opportunity from God.

In our weakness He is strong.

So our language deficiencies are actually useful to the kingdom. Just don't ask us to get a moving van for you.