Langzaam praaten, alsjeblieft!

          We continue our Dutch lessons….. it is oh….so…..slow!  We meet over Skype with our teacher for an hour and our learning coach for another hour on Tues. nights.  The MTC offers senior couples language lessons for 6 months so our lessons will soon be coming to an end.  Our progress has been slow.  We do have a much bigger vocabulary now and can read many signs.  We’ve discovered we can read the little children’s story in the Dutch Liahona : ) We can pray fairly well in church, but can’t yet pour out our hearts to God in prayer in Dutch!

 Our sweet neighbor, Ineka continues to be our best assistant for learning Dutch.  We meet and just talk in Dutch.  I usually have something to tell her that I have practiced in Dutch.   She corrects it for me. We talk about what I want to learn and how I really want to be able to understand what is said in the meetings at church.  One of the kindest gestures we have received here came from Ineka.  Although she says she “doesn’t believe” in God, she came over one day with the Lord’s Prayer translated into Dutch, to help us at church.  I was so touched by her thoughtfulness.  It wasn’t an easy task.  Yesterday she came over with two books she had checked out from the Zeist library for us.  “Dutch for Dummies” and a children’s book with 1,000 Dutch/English words!  How can we not be successful with such love and kindness!

On the first Sunday in Jan. we attended Fast and Testimony meeting in Groningen.  For the first time I understood some of what they were saying!  It felt like a big breakthrough!  I’m sure part of the reason was because many testimonies have similar phrases and because we have been studying the “Missionary vocabulary and Phrase” book.  It was very exciting! 

That said, it has been frustrating that we still can’t follow the talks/lessons at church.  Even though we recognize more words it’s not enough.  Some of the problem is that everyone speaks so fast the words blur together.  I want to yell “langzaam praaten, alsjeblieft!”  (speak slowly, please!).  When people speak slowly we can understand so much more. 

Which brings me to this realization….learning and understanding a language of any kind requires as much or more effort in listening as it does in speaking.  So we have our learning coach get someone to share 5 min. talks in Dutch on a church subject during our lesson so we can practice listening.  We speak up and ask people to speak slowly and repeat what they said.  We are working on listening… not just what we want to say.

Which brought me to another thought.  In the language of prayer, is listening not the hardest part?  Do we want to pour out our hearts to God without the same effort given to listening?  Do we understand what God is saying to us?  Do we understand the language of personal revelation?  Instead of “speak slowly, please”, do we want to say to God, “speak loudly, please!)?  Just as the Dutch are frustrated when we don’t understand, so our Heavenly Father must be when we don’t listen/understand what He is trying to tell us.  I know that receiving personal revelation is like learning a language, that we can practice listening, and we can learn to hear and understand what God has to tell us.  I know that He wants to take us by the hand and guide us through our mortal journey if we will but learn to listen.