It was Mrs. Varner’s kindergarten class for me. The experience, however, is universal to nearly all of us.
The kids sit in a circle. The teacher quietly feeds one kid a word, and he/she whispers it in the ear of the next kid, etc. Finally everyone roars in laughter when the final kid in the chain says aloud ‘the word’ for everyone to hear.
But it’s not just kids and circles and words. The issue is a life issue.
In the early 1990s a video game called Zero Wing was translated from its native Japanese into English. One line in the (mis-)translated version, ‘all your base are belong to us,’ later became an underground phenomenon facilitated by the internet. Whole communities (read: websites) grew up around this one mistake. The phrase became a symbol, an analogy, for something lost in translation.
I grew up around the Bible. Both of my parents were “PKs.” Preacher’s Kids. Lest you think that a homogenous, match-made-in-heaven kind of thing, one grandfather was a wise-though-poorly educated carpenter from Oklahoma while the other was a more liberal Ph.D. Presbyterian. Mom was a Christian. As of this writing, Dad still isn’t.
The reason this strikes me is because my own wandering from the church at about age 13 was, in part, based on a lack of agreement to the authority of the Bible. Just because this book, and preachers thereof, say “Thus saith the Lord,” what does it prove?
For me, the context for the conversation ended up being around the subject of value.
I, you see, am a valuologist. A student of value, values, and how and why people make the decisions they do in the marketplace.
As a businessdude, I spent my waking hours studying people’s buying behavior. My goal, on behalf of whoever was employing me at the time, was to separate a person from their money.
So, as I wrestled with Christ some two decades later, I came back to ‘how does this book apply to my life?’ I was less concerned about the validity of the consistent translation of the original texts, an issue put to rest by many more scholarly than I, but I was still seeking how this book related to me.
In my search for personal application I went to many trusted historical sources. Of interest were tomes like Nave’s Topical Bible, wherein you can look up a topic and it points you toward all the verses dealing with that topic.
Blank. Nada.
Open up Nave’s and look up the word ‘value’ and what do you get?
Blank. Nada.
Look up ‘money’ and what do you get?
Mostly it was ‘instances of.’ There was something pointing to Judas’ attack of conscience after selling Jesus down the river. And of all cited verses, there was one reference pointing toward ‘the love of money is the root of all evil.’
Hmmm….
This just didn’t groove with what I knew the marketplace to be. I refused to believe that this book, the so-called Book of Life, had so little to say about the subject of value. It might not be as literal as ‘Used Car Buying for Dummies,’ but could a real God, an all-knowing, all-powerful God have so little to say about something so presently part of every life I knew on the planet?
This book is the quest for that which has been lost in translation. I don’t count it the fault of anyone, though there are some suspects.
The clergy is historically the most underpaid professional class in the greater economy. This true, one might assume that their pursuit of loftier goals came with the cognition that they weren’t going to get wealthy doing it. Their engagement of the marketplace has been minimal. Interestingly, when in business school I did a research project which uncovered a related statistic. A study was done of grad school graduates regarding their general financial literacy. Not surprisingly students from the school of business scored the highest. The lowest scores came from grads entering the teaching profession.
Walk with me. Search with me. Dare to think that if there is a God that He wouldn’t leave out the day-to-day stuff. And a core glue to that day-to-day stuff is money.
Hmmm…