Yung Luv

On Sunday mornings for about four weeks now I've been teaching three or four non-native English speakers during the bible class time. George, the facilitator of another class on the Gospel of John, has been picking these four visitors up and bringing them to "church". "My" students are all from Vietnam. One of them probably can't learn English though he is about 13 years old--he has had some kind of brain damage from seizures, I think. His name (I learned from a translator about a month ago) is Dung, pronounced, Yüng, thankfully. :-)

I didn't know about the seizures or the brain damage for the first two weeks I taught them. I kept trying to make him try to speak English (he seemed like he was listening intently; he ought to be able to say something by now). Since he would refuse to speak, I thought he must just be a belligerent teenager who begrudged coming to our country. When I found out that I was wrong I decided to give him a ball last week as a gift. Then, yesterday, when he saw me, he smiled really big. That was a first! Apparently he loves "church" even though he understands not a single word.

Words have meaning, don't they . . . when I say "ball" you almost know what I mean without any context. But I've noticed that "love" has meaning, too, maybe even more meaning. Isn't that true?

I remember a scene in the Forest Gump movie. Forest says to Jenny, something like, "I may not be a smart man, Jenny, but I know what love is."

I have to think that maybe knowledge, just like it doesn't necessarily make us wise, doesn't make us more loving either. I try to communicate love by exhausting my teaching abilities; Yüng just smiles really big. . . . I won on knowledge, but I think he won the love game.