Tonight we had our weekly worship service and then announcements. Several weeks ago I made a "Reading Guide for the Gospel of John" booklet and have been trying to get people working on it (reading short passages daily and answering a couple of questions about them). We have a chart to mark progress on the wall, so tonight I asked if anyone had brought their booklets so that I could mark where they were. Several people pulled them out, which was certainly encouraging. But even better were the two questions I got.

First, one man and his wife said that they tried to read but didn't understand. I asked them what they didn't understand-- the reading or the booklet. They opened a Bible to "San Juan" and showed me how their version didn't have all the verses that I refered to. As it turned out, they had been trying to read First John! If you don't know, John wrote 4 books in the new testament, but only one is a biography of Jesus; the other three are very short letters. We laughed for a while over the confusion, and I think they're ready to try again this week.

The other question I got was "What does the Word mean?" The beginning of John says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." A little later on, it explains that the Word was Jesus, but not in a super direct way. I walked the woman asking me about this through the passage and tried to very simply address why John didn't just outright say "Jesus." All this to say that it was exciting to see her asking questions about things she didn't understand. That's definitely not something they learn to do in school here, and I think it's the key to unlocking reading comprehension.

As I'm working with these women and writing Bible studies for the fall (well, our spring), I feel everything I learned from teaching coming into play. This community is particularly weak on critical thinking skills and literacy/reading comprehension, and I'm so grateful for the experience I had in Charlotte, particularly with the less-intelligent and/or less-educated students.

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