Pues Dios no nos ha dado un espiritu de timidez, sino do poder, de amor y de dominio propio.
2 Timoteo 1:7

For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline. 2 Timothy 1:7

Today I’m launching on a path eight years in the making. Its my first day of Spanish I at a local community college. This isn’t “Continuing Education for Old People” – its a real college class! The call to learn to speak Spanish came eight years ago, when we were at our church in Lubbock, and it hasn’t gone away. Over the last couple of years, I’ve taken a few stabs at learning Spanish, but they have been self-paced and informal, and I haven’t really been successful. What started as a general call, however, has become a real need. I volunteer at a food bank that serves many clients who only speak Spanish, and my not speaking Spanish is a real barrier to helping them. I needed to stop fooling around with this.

I have two primary challenges here. For one, I do not naturally take to languages. I took the obligatory two years of language in high school, studying French because I lived in New Hampshire, knocking on the door of Canada. But when I had checked that required language box, I was done with French. In the mid-1990s, I went on a life-changing mission trip to Russia. My Russian partners tried to teach me very basic Russian phrases, but when I tried to repeat them, though to my ear I was saying precisely what they were saying, they kept saying no, I didn’t have it right. Okay, I guess I just don’t have an affinity for languages.

As though not being good at learning languages isn’t enough, my bigger challenge has been fear. I hate it when my perfectionism rears its ugly head, but here it is. I’m afraid of looking like an idiot. For some reason, I expect myself to utter perfect Spanish phrases and sentences right out of the gate. My brain understands that that is utterly impossible; making mistakes and learning from them is part of the process of learning to speak a language, just like anything else. Still, it has been a real barrier. As I was checking to see if people over 50 years old even CAN learn a new language, I read in an AARP article, that “The challenge,…as for most grown-ups, is feeling comfortable speaking a language badly.” Yep. That’s it. I don’t feel “comfortable” doing anything badly. I don’t mind that I’m bad at things, such as fixing a car; I readily accept that there are lots of things that I can’t do. But I don’t do them! Today I will begin doing something that I know, going into it, I will do badly.

But God has not given me a spirit of fear. I’m shocked to report that I’m actually excited! I love being a student. I expect it will be pretty humorous being old enough to be my classmates’ mother; probably my professor’s too. AARP states that I can learn a new language, and adds that it is very good for my brain. So here goes! I’m running right into what I have feared. So what? I may be “too old” to learn a new language, but I’m also too old to be afraid. God has given me power to answer His call.