Language Evaluation--opportunity to share the Truth!

At the beginning of the year, I took on a new role on our team in charge of language stuff.  My job is to encourage our team to keep growing and learning in our language, even after we achieve our language levels.  Our language has so much vocabulary and their are so many similar dialects around us, which makes it a continual process.  It also fell upon me to arrange for our language evaluations.  Well, obviously setting up evaluators for my own evaluation would be difficult to do without in some way swaying the score I would receive.  Not sure what to do, a team mate suggested working through our language teacher.

One day I went to see our teacher and told her what I was wanting.  She knew some teachers that would be able to help us out.  We arranged the when and the where.  I did not have the list of questions with me at the time, so I sent them over with Rich another day.  I thought they would be self-explanatory.  The following day, I sent over a list of questions in French that I thought would be clearer.  That just confused the situation.  So the day before the evaluation, I had to go see her again to explain clearly what it was we were wanting.  There were a lot of things on the list that had to do with everyday life but the most important was the last question, which was to show that we could do our job.

With everything clear, hopefully, I stopped by our team mates to say how relieved I was that they were not taking the evaluation with Rich and I.  I would have been way more stressed out and hoped that all the kinks would be worked out before their evaluation.

Morning came and everyone arrived.  We served coffee and bread to the evaluators before we got started.  Rich went first and joked around breaking the ice and setting himself at ease.  He came out feeling good about how things went. 

I continued to be nervous and had problems hearing and just being comfortable with people I did not know.  Finally I got comfortable enough in our conversation to be able to hear and speak clearly.  I was encouraged as I continued by the smile from the lady evaluator.  We came to a point where they were ready to dismiss me, but I had still not gotten to tell my story.  I asked for permission to tell my story.  They permitted me to do so.  I told them the story of creation to the fall to the command for sacrifices to the insufficiency of sacrifice alone and the promise of a Savior and what our Lord did for us. 

They had a question or two and then thanked me for the story and dismissed me.  When all was said and done, Rich and I both scored very well.  I am so thankful that things ended up so much smoother than I feared.  I am also grateful that I was able to take that time to share the Good News.  Lift up these three evaluators and our teacher that have heard the Truth.  Ask the One that gives the growth to grow these seeds.