Radical, Ridiculous Significance

I have been very lucky in my life and have gotten to do many things.  I watched both of my children being born and raised them.  I served our great country in the United States Air Force and was recognized as Airman of the year.  I went supersonic speed in an F-4 Phantom and flew over the pyramids in Cairo, Egypt on the same flight.  I performed aerobatics with the Holiday Inn Aerobatic team.  I leaned out of a helicopter over Hoover dam and all that was between me and certain death was a leather strap.  I have run marathons, lived in many great places, worked in television for most of my adult life, spoken to thousands of people, played music and performed plays in front of thousands more.

These are great memories and I cherish them.  I did something recently, though, that was the most radical, ridiculously significant thing I have ever done in my life.  This past August I traveled with a group of guys to Peru to trek through the Andes Mountains.  But, it wasn’t about hiking.  That was simply our transportation.  It was about something much bigger.

Dan Hintz joined us on the trip.  About 25 years ago Dan and his wife, Diane, took their 2 year old son to an Andes mountain village and asked, in mostly grunts and lots of hands gestures, if they could live in the village and learn their language.  After much negotiation and convincing they were granted permission and the story began.  

Dan would get up in the morning and go out to the fields with the village men and help them farm their fields and listen to them.  He would record them talking on a tape recorder.  He would show them a shovel or a sickle or point to a cow and document what they would call it.  Through total immersion in this Quechuan community he eventually learned to speak their language and started to write it phonetically.

He tells a great story of working in the fields one day and listening as one of the villagers told a joke to another man.  After Dan and the men stopped laughing Dan started to write the joke down in his notebook.  The local men scoffed at him and told him that their language could not be written.  Soon, another villager came up and Dan proceeded to read the joke to the newcomer.  Dan must be a great joke teller because the man laughed and, as Dan says, that changed everything.  

The language he was learning is called Quechuan and was only spoken.  Despite being hundreds of years old the language had no alphabet.  It couldn’t be written.  Imagine all the things in your life -, letters from loved ones, cards, your history - that are documented through the written word.  There are almost 7000 languages spoken across the world and about 2000 of them can’t be written.  Quechuan is no longer one of them.

Dan had promised these people that took his family in that he would make their language legitimate with the purpose of eventually offering them a Bible, God’s Word, in their native tongue.

Fast forward 25 years to August of 2012.  A group of 9 men and 2 ten year olds from America, they called us gringos, went trekking unannounced into mountain villages high in the Peruvian Andes fulfilling Dan’s promise.  Even more significantly, we came fulfilling God’s promise that all people would be given the chance to consume His word.  

Handing these beautiful Quechuan people the very first Bibles in their language was a blessing I will never forget.  It really is so humbling and indescribable.  So, I am not going to try.  Only being there can you truly feel the supernatural Holiness and Godliness of the moments. However, I did lug a camera along to document it and feel blessed that I could put a video together.  I think it effectively captures the pure beauty of the trip as well as possible but completely misses how incredibly exhausting it was physically.  

I hope you enjoy the attached video.  I pray that it somehow translates...