Dangwa Pierre was surprised when the Bible translator started asking about the Hdi word for "love" again. The translation team had already discussed the word thoroughly.

Almost every verb in the Hdi language of Cameroon had forms ending in i, a, and u. But when it came to the word for love, there were only i and a.

The Bible translator asked the Dangwa and the Hdi translation committee, “Could you ‘dvi’ your wife?” “Yes,” they said. That would mean that the wife had been loved but the love was gone. “Could you ‘dva’ your wife?” “Yes,” Dangwa 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?” Everyone laughed. Dangwa explained, “Of course not! 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 you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would be compelled to keep on loving her. No, we would never say ‘dvu.’ It just doesn’t exist.”

Thinking about John 3:16 the Bible translator asked, “Could God ‘dvu’ people?” There was complete silence for three or four minutes; then, tears flowed down Dangwa's face. The other men began weeping too. Finally, Dangwa responded, “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.”

One simple vowel changed the meaning from “I love you based on what you do and who you are,” to “I love you, based on Who I am.” God had encoded the story of His unconditional love into their language. For centuries, the word was there - unused but available, grammatically correct and quite understandable.

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When this new understanding of love was understood, it challenged the entire traditional belief system of the Hdi. If God was like that, did they need the spirits of the ancestors to intercede for them?  Did they need sorcery to relate to the spirits? Many decided the answer was no, and  the number of believers quickly grew from a few hundred to several thousand.

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Dangwa finally asked the Bible translator why he had asked about the word for love again when they had already covered it. Then the translator became silent for moment. Finally he explained, God spoke to me in a dream and told be to ask again about the word for love in Hdi.

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The Hdi New Testament Dedication Celebration

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The New Testament in Hdi has now been printed, and 29,000 speakers feel the impact of passages like Ephesians 5:25:  “Husbands, ‘dvu’ your wives, just as Christ ‘dvu’-d the church…”  They are now absorbing and seeking to model the amazing, unconditional love they have received.

 

Around the world, community by community, as God’s Word is translated, people are gaining access to this great love story about how God ‘dvu’-d us enough to sacrifice His only Son for us, so that our relationship with Him can be restored. The cross changes everything!  Someday, the last word of the last bit of Scripture for the last community will be done, and everyone will be able to understand the story of God’s unconditional love.