So, this post may be somewhat confessional (in a harmless way), but in thinking back on my life, there are a few things that have had positive impacts on my life that started out with dubious motivations on my part.
I take comfort in knowing I’m not totally alone in this. Here are a couple of examples:
One is music: Like most guys who learn to play the guitar at a young age, I have to honestly say I did it because it seemed like “a good way to meet chicks.” Not that it actually worked out that way. I never really played the Guitar for my wife until after we were engaged, and since then I’ve taught myself to play around a dozen different instruments and have gotten on a few CDs. I found out I loved the music for its own sake, rather than the dubious (and slightly sexist) initial motivation I had as a teenager.
The second is Greek: I initially studied Ancient Greek not because I wanted to connect with our rich Classical heritage, but because I wanted to get revenge. On my mission, I was tired of preachers and self-styled autodidacts who would proclaim “well, the original Greek in the NT says this and therefore Mormons are evil” and decided if I learned Greek I could slam them: “NO! It does not say that, it says this you eeeeediooooot!”
Not a very noble motivation, yet I feel that knowing some Greek has enriched my life – it’s helped me in writing papers for my major and even helped me get a nice high score on the GRE vocabulary section. Plus, it is nice to be able to connect to our rich Classical Heritage in its original language. But all that came later. The idea of revenge on preachers I met on my mission may be the furthest thing from my mind now, but it got me started on the path, anyway. (Hint to missionaries though: 90% of the time, when you are told “well, if we look at the original Greek, we see that it really says this….” they’re lying or at least stretching the truth quite a bit).
Well, the scriptures say nothing good can come from an evil source (bad wells and bad water and bad trees and bad fruit and all that), but it seems things worked out for me anyway (at least in those areas).
So – who else wants to confess? (This means you, Clark! I know you worked for Los Alamos because you wanted to take over the world or something like that….. ) 😉
I had a double major at BYU: computer science and Spanish. It was only because I needed to fill up my schedule my last year that I turned my Spanish minor into a major (“hmm, with 6 more classes, I can pick up that major; let’s see how I can fit in 9 more Spanish credits a semester). I also was fighting a mentality from some family members that science/engineering degrees weren’t as “valid” as literature. Turns out those two semesters, killing myself to take 36 hours, were the two best semesters of my BYU experience, and that was 75% due to the Spanish classes and about 25% due to the CS classes.
It also gave me the graduate school bug, and I remember being torn between grad school in computer science and grad school in Spanish. The practical side of me “won” out and I resigned myself to doing an MS in CS just because I could make more money, even though I really didn’t like programming (“natural” languages were more my forte).
Again – the joke was on me. 8+ years later of balancing a full-time (non-programming) computer career with a CS MS and now almost a PhD, I found that my initial hunch was right on — there was deep stuff I could study and *NOT* have to program — oh, and I had a fairly natural gift for the research.
So I picked up the Spanish major just to be able to argue the “why yes, I _do_ have a humanities major, you fool” line at parties, but the joke was on me – I actually loved it. And I went to grad school in CS to make more money, but I found out that there was actually a deep philosphical/theoretical side that was much more fun, and the Spanish background gave me the impetus for my current CS research.
Not sure if that qualifies for what you were looking for, Ivan.
[I should mention, the Spanish degree allows for interesting moments when family members want to talk about their book clubs. I can trash Isabel Allende as overrated on multiple fronts, recoil in horror at the “100 Years of Solitude” translations, and extol the greatness that was Paz, Neruda, and Mistral in the original tongue and leave them without rejoinder. And I know Perl.]
queuno –
no, that works. And it was great. Thanks for sharing.
I broke the Sabbath today by buying gas, because I neglected to gas up the car yesterday. I tried to mitigate my sin by choosing a gas station where I thought I might place a Book of Mormon and other church material. The cashier, from Senegal, accepted my offer of French and English copies of the Book of Mormon, and Wolof and English copies of Gospel Fundamentals.
Some of my initial motives for Hebrew and Greek were quite similar to yours, Ivan. I’d learn Greek and Hebrew and then those JW’s would *really* get an earful…
Anyone who says “original Greek” probably doesn’t have any training in it 🙂
When someone says “The original greek means…”, then a cool come-back is to say: “You mean the Bible isn’t translated correctly?”
I’m reading the KJV Old Testament right now. I recently read Proverbs. It was rather difficult because even with the LDS footnotes of “IE”, “HEB” and “OR”, a lot of the idioms, whether from the original Hebrew, or from King James English, just don’t make sense.
I made it from Genesis through Psalms with only occasionally referring to the NIV (New International Version).
But, I had to have the NIV to help me through most of Proverbs. And in Proverbs, there was a lot that still went over my head, so I then got out my 30-year old Jerusalem Bible which is a paraphrase.
It got unwieldy reading in bed with three books, so I bought a new 4-in-1 parallel Bible, with KJV, NIV, NASB (New American Standard Bible), and NLT (New Living Translation). I still use my LDS Bible for reading KJV, because I want to mark it up better, as that’s what I take to church.
NASB is a refinement of the ASV which was the parent of the good old RSV. The NASB is still a word-for-word translation, along the lines of the KJV, but with modern English, so some of the Hebrew idioms don’t come through unless you have a commentary or good footnotes.
The NIV is a balance, using word-for-word wherever possible, but using thought-for-thought where needed when a word-for-word translation doesn’t convey the right meaning. A lot of the “HEB” and “OR” alternate translations in the LDS footnotes are the same as the NIV translation.
The NLT is a thought-for-thought translation, but in some rare places it seems like it falls into a loose paraphrase. There were a couple verses in Proverbs where neither the KJV, the NIV, nor the NASB made sense to me, and the NLT finally opened my eyes. But I think you can occasionally detect what appears to be some translator bias in it, when you see a word or idea that doesn’t appear in either of the KJV, NIV, or NASB. But overall the NLT is comfortable to read. I think it would be great for children through early teens.
So to get this back to Greek and Hebrew, the KJV translators were apparently better at Greek than they were at Hebrew. Or else they just did a poor job on the idioms in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.
Maybe Isaiah will go better this time when I read it in parallel versions.
I paid tithing on my casino winnings, does that count? Just kidding…I do know a former RS president who did that on her Bingo winnings though!
I was cut from my HS soccer team in my Junior year, practiced really hard for the next 12 months, came back in my Senior year as a Starter, was the team MVP for the season and we won the City championship! does that count?
I took French all through school, could speak it quite well, but hated it so much, and then was sent Spanish speaking on my mission and have since been able to use my language skills for numerous benefits for local spanish speaking immigrants both in and out of the church.
I think my desire to learn more about the Church fits the theme.
Here’s a brief synopsis:
I’d been arguing with friends and classmates about their foolish belief in God and religions in general, Mormons in particular. Fed up with a date’s reply “well, that’s not really what we believe”, I began reading and researching.
In the end,trying to enlighten his captive mind led me to find the Light for myself.
Good results, from what were more sinister motives on my part.
Tea wins!
I went on my mission for less than noble reasons: (a) I got it in my head that I would never be able to marry a nice Mormon girl unless I became an RM and (b) besides, all my friends were going, so I might as well go, too.
(To be honest, I never seriously thought about *not* going, but the above was pretty much my thought process as to why I should go.)
It turned out that going on a mission was one of the smarter things I have done in my life, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.
I agree – so far, Tea wins! (not that this was a contest).
All the tales have been good so far. Very cool. I think of it less as a “bad tree bad fruit” thing as I said in my post, and more of a “how the Lord can turn even bad stuff to good ends” type thing.
In my last area on my mission, I started out as the president of a branch with about 20 attending members and 500 on the roles. It was winter, they hadn’t seen a baptism in 13 months (in South America), and the mission president wanted to get a local member called as BP so he could close the area for proselyting (the branch was close to the mission home city so they would have ecclesiatical resources and on-demand missionary support).
This was pre-standardized budget, and we had to raise the funds.
I was in one of those psychological “zones” where I knew we’d be successful, so I promised the members that if they helped pay the past-due bills on the heat and electricity (which had been shut off leaving us with cooooolllllllld water), we’d have baptisms. So far, so good.
I upped the ante, so to speak, when we met the local Red Cross folks who had a monthly Bingo night fundraiser. I’d asked the mission president if he cared how I cleaned out the financial mess; he didn’t. So we bought some paint, found some SUD stencils in the closet, and painted SUD on the back of each folding chair in the branch building. Then I rented them to the Red Cross for Bingo Night. The guy we lived with made some great comments about how he noticed the Mormons’ contribution to the cause, because every chair bore our mark. He assumed we had donated them for the fundraiser, but in reality, the branch made some serious coin off it.
We paid the gas bill and averaged a baptism a week for the next few months. When I went home, the branch roles had been cleaned up to about 190 members and we had 90+ my last Sunday in attendance.
Bingo night. Definitely a Church fundraiser.
ah ha! Someone who knows greek! Can you tell me what the translation for “Instant to Watchful Instant” would be? (I have this project at work to update our squadron patch…) Thanks!
Queuno,
No baptisms for 13 months in Latin America? Isn’t that quite unusual?