This has been a tough week for us both, but we’re still here and still trusting God!
Joanna’s neck, shoulders and arms are hurting bad, so she decided to have a week off writing, as much as possible. Not ideal at school, as you can imagine, but it has helped a bit and her teacher has been very understanding. We continue praying for a breakthrough in this.
Monday morning for me was a new grammer topic: asking questions. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? For very simple questions (like “Excuse me, what time is it?”) then questions in French are indeed simple. For more complicated questions, there are rules (there are always rules in French…) and to this Englishman they weren’t especially intuitive.
I eventually got my brain around it all sometime on Wednesday evening, after going back to first principles and working it out from scratch. Good! But we had a test on Thursday morning covering that and a bunch of other things which comprise a certain unit of our course. I wasn’t best prepared for the test, having only had chance for one quick read-through of my revision notes. It was also the first time-limited test and I didn’t finish everything. I’m resigned to a poor mark. Hey-ho.
Oh, and then, on completing the test, just when I thought we’d have an easier rest of the morning… we had another test! At which I did rather badly (we marked it straight afterwards), not having revised: it was always intended to be a surprise test, but I thought it would be sometime on Friday.
Patisserie was needed with lunch on Thursday to aid recovery.
It was really good, however, to have been given the opportunity to share from the Bible at the small Église MLK Massy church plant meeting on Tuesday evening. I talked from John 12 for about 20 minutes: the first time I had done this in French for French people (rather than for my class at school). The pasteur said I was clear, which was encouraging. I had thought it would be some months before this kind of opportunity would come along, so it’s great to start getting experience at this stage. It did take a looooooong time to prepare though!
One thing I have taken from this week’s experiences is the clearer realisation that, although we will both complete our language courses here, we will then need to continue learning and revising and correcting and being corrected for a very long time after that. I sort of always knew that, but it’s been brought home more forcibly!
Breakthrough France 