Hello, and welcome to A Different Kind of Missionary. My name is Jeffrey, I am the youngest son of Henry and Deborah Martin. I am currently a student at Loyola University Chicago and have grown increasingly aware of the significance of their work with the Sudanese.
This blog was created because I wanted to help my parents out in someway and I felt that this is what I could do. I myself do not fully understand the inner workings of what they are doing, but that is part of the point of this blog, to bring the intricacies of their work to a very public forum, so that we can begin to wrap our heads around it all. I am going to be very honest right about now, when I first set out to write this blog entry my understanding of what they were doing was to “create a written language”, but after I showed them an rough draft of what you are reading now, they laughed and said “Jeffrey, we aren’t trying to create a language… we are trying to build an alphabet” and I was like “what do you mean ‘build an alphabet?’” and they responded “well, there is already a spoken language, so we aren’t ‘creating’ anything, we are just trying to put the language into a form that can be represent the spoken language” – that is of course a paraphrase of what they actually said, but you get the point. Their purpose is to try and build the alphabet so they can hand it over to the Sudanese themselves and they can just learn to write the language themselves.
Since this is a public forum, and not meant to just be a representation of what I think and feel, all the time, I am going to be referring to my parents as Henry and Deborah, because it will just keep things simple for you all.
This blog will include updates on what Henry and Deborah are up to, which will help to keep you all informed. My hope is that as we go there will be an illumination into what we know about Henry and Deborah and the incredible work they are doing with the Sudanese people.
Questions that I have right off the bat: “what is missions?”, “What is a missionary?”, “What is the common belief about missionaries?”, “do they have to leave their home to be considered missionaries, or can they stay right where they are and be fully involved in a culture, but still serving the needs of another culture?”
Next time I want to get into the significance of the blog name, and why I feel its important, so look forward to that, and a post from Henry and Deborah about their own work, and why they feel its important. Welcome to the missions field my friends,
peace.
