love without limit

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.
Ephesians 5:25‭-‬27 NKJV

By Wycliffe Bible Translators USA

Translator Lee Bramlett was confident that God had left his mark on the Hdi culture somewhere, but though he searched, he could not find it. 

Then one night in a dream, God prompted Lee to look again at the Hdi word for “love.” Lee and his wife, Tammi, had learned that verbs in Hdi consistently end in one of three vowels — i, a and u. But when it came to the word for love, they could only find i and a. Why no u?

Lee asked the translation committee, “Could you ‘dvi’ your wife?”

“Yes,” they said. That would mean that the wife had been loved but the love was gone.

“Could you ‘dva’ your wife?” Lee asked.

“Yes,” they said. That kind of love depended on the wife’s actions. She would be loved as long as she remained faithful and cared for her husband well.

“Could you ‘dvu’ your wife?” Lee asked. Everyone laughed.

“Of course not!” they said. “If you said that, you would have to keep loving your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water, never made you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would be compelled to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say ‘dvu.’ It just doesn’t exist.”

Lee sat quietly for a while, thinking about John 3:16, and then he asked, “Could God ‘dvu’ people?”

There was complete silence; then tears started to trickle down the weathered faces of these elderly men. 

“Do you know what this would mean?” they asked. “This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, millennia after millennia, while all that time we rejected his great love. He is compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people.”

One simple vowel, and the meaning was changed from “I love you based on what you do and who you are,” to “I love you based on who I am. I love you because of me and not because of you.”

God had encoded the story of his unconditional love right into their language. 

The New Testament in Hdi has been printed, and now 29,000 speakers have the ability to be impacted by passages like Ephesians 5:25, “Husbands, ‘dvu’ your wives, just as Christ ‘dvu’-d the church. …” 

Read more stories like this in our e-book, “In Your Own Words.”