The Grands Letter

Dear Grands,

Acts 17:26-27, “…He made from one, every nation of mankind to live on all the

face of the Earth, having determined their appointed times, and the boundaries

of their habitation,

27 that they should seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him,

though He is not far from each one of us…”

God so ‘Dvu’-d the World

God uses a small word with a giant meaning.

The Wycliffe missionary translators working among the Hdi people of Cameroon felt certain that God must have left His mark on their culture, but struggled to find it. Had He somehow left a clue regarding the nature of His love for them? They discovered it in the most unlikely place, the ending of verbs.

For almost every verb, they could find forms ending in i, a, and u. But when it came to the word for love, they could only find i and a. Why no u? They asked their translation helpers, including the leaders in the community, “Could you ‘dvi’ your wife?”

“Yes,” they said. That would mean that the wife had been loved, but the love was gone.

The missionary then asked, “Could you ‘dva’ your wife?”

“Yes,” they said. That kind of love depended on the wife’s actions. She would be loved as long as

she remained faithful and cared for her husband well.

“Could you ‘dvu’ your wife?” the missionary asked. Everyone laughed!

“Of course not!” they said. “If you said that, you would have to keep loving your wife no matter

what she did, even if she never got you water, never made your meals. Even if she committed

adultery, you would be compelled to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say ‘dvu.’ It

just doesn’t exist.

The missionary 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?” they asked. “This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, millennia after millennia, while all that time we rejected His great love. He is compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people.”

God had encoded the story of His unconditional love right into the Hdi language. For centuries, the little word was there – unused, but available. When the word was finally spoken, it called into question this people’s entire belief system and was instrumental in thousands coming to Christ.

First Corinthians 1:27 says, “…God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise…” Surely, “dvu” in the Hdi language is one of those things. What has the LORD been saying to us that we have failed to notice?

Heartily in Christ Jesus,

(Dado III)

NOTE: Story forwarded from Ethnos 360; cited from www.wycliffe.org/blog/featured/god-so-dvud-the-world .

Gene L. Jeffries, Th.D.

Springdale, Arkansas 72764

United States of America

“We never know that God is all we need

until He becomes all that we have.”