ASL Video Update

So, no . . . The disc with our five hours of ASL video recording on it still has not been found, now that most of the snow around Lynchburg has melted. The student intern has graduated and has left the area. I have not spoken to him directly, but assume that his wallet, with what was supposed to be our final studio time in it, is as “lost and gone forever” as Jimmy Hoffa, Amelia Earhart, My Darling Clementine, and so many other casualties of the Bermuda Triangle. Thanks so much for praying. As I said before, good things may come out of this (so, if you’ve been praying, please don’t stop now!). Because the Lord gave us busy people to accomplish this (they say, “if you want something done, and done right, give the job to a busy man/woman”), not all the signers were really able to get intimately acquainted with the whole book before they were actually in the LU studio in front of the camera. Nor were they all familiar with the unnerving, high pressure experience of signing to a camera while following a teleprompter under really intense lights. Also, because some of the truths we are communicating are not exactly elementary, they simply do not translate easily into actual American Sign Language, with its own distinct grammar. To be brutally honest,some of us felt like we were at times “settling” for just signing the English words as written, WHICH IS NOT AT ALL THE SAME AS ASL, and is less than what we were aiming for. Time is extremely precious, of course, and no one outside of our little group will ever truly know and appreciate how much HARD work was lost in the snow that day (including the magnificent food spread my wife put together, since we were working right through the dinner hour!). We have other big projects we had hoped to dive right into in 2019. But, clearly, the Lord had other plans, and even I can see how the chance for a redo at this point could actually be the best in the long run, as painful as this is. No use crying over spilled mushroom coffee, I always say. Thank y’all!