The Tuareg are some of the most difficult people to reach with the Gospel. Find out why and how Cash and Ann dedicated most of their lives to these nomadic peoples.
MUSIC:
Sponsor Music by: Drunk Pedestrians – Mean
Interlude Music by:
Chris Zabriski – Laserdisc, Cylinder One, Oxygen Garden, That Kid in Fourth Grade Who Really Liked the Denver Broncos
Adrianna Krikl – Tomorrow
Scott Holmes – Old Oak Tree
Steve Combs – Delta Is (Theme K)
Here starts the auto-generated transcription of Planting Churches in the Sahara with Cash and Ann Godbold – Part 2:
Alright. We’re back. This is truth about Muslims. This is Howard. And I’m Trevor, and this is our episode 2 of our interview with Cash and Anne Godbold.
And we love them. Yeah. They are just amazing people and so we’re really excited to give you this episode. Yeah. But before we go any further with episode 2, let’s just start with a clip from last week.
I’ve heard in the past, like, that you guys saw very little fruit for a very long time. That probably is a wrong vocabulary word. Okay. Give us the correct What what people keep thinking when I say what I say, they I say it was 24 years before we baptized the first believers. Okay?
They say it the way you say it, no fruit. We were having fruit for 24 years, and you’ve got to realize that. You are planting seed and as long as you’re planting seed, then God can use it. Quit thinking we don’t have any fruit. That is a very discouraging thing.
I say there are only 2 kinds of missionaries. The one at night who goes to bed and says, nothing happened today. Lord, I don’t see how you’ll ever use me. The other one who says, thank you Lord for everything you did today to advance the gospel. Same man, same actions, but 2 different points of view.
Okay, so that was my favorite clip from last week because, you know, essentially what Cash does is give us a biblical theology of missions, and explaining that the mission of God is more like farming. We tend to think of the mission of God as just the harvest. Yeah. Like return on investment, kind of, you know, modern mentality, and cash, man. And you kinda tell he’s a whippersnapper man.
He’s he’s the kinda guy that it’s just like, you know, this is tedious, it’s hard, it’s not easy, but we will continue to do it and forward the gospel. And I’m just like, man, I could just hang out with you all day long. Right. And I was really excited to ask Cash just a bunch of the details. Like, what was it really like to live amongst the nomads and the Sahara Yeah.
Specifically. It’s not every day that you get to meet somebody that has nomadized. Yeah. Is that even a word? But, you know, we used it.
Yeah. Ash used it. He used it. That’s why I’m using it. And he he takes us all the way back to day 1.
Well, the first day I can remember, I can even see it in my mind. The older missionary, who had been there for many years, had a compound and his house and a house that he, the mission gave to us. And he invited me that first day to go out to the backyard where he had some guests. See, in nomad style, you have guests almost anytime because wherever they end up, that’s where they got to stay because they haven’t got a a Motel 6 or a hotel. They go where some friend is.
And when we would make contact with them out in the bush, then when they came to town, they would stay with us. That would be normal, fair for them. It helped them keep their their camels, corralled. Inside of our fence. But they didn’t always live in the compound.
We first started off with the wagon as our living facility. It was about twice the size of that desk there. And we put our food and our beds and our water and everything in there, children and wife, and I rode the horse and, she rode the wagon. Alright. So listeners, you have no idea how big the desk is that he’s referencing here, so I was trying to tell Howard, like, how do we explain the size of what he’s defining here?
And it really comes down to, like, a 4 by 8 sheet of plywood. Yeah. If you’ve ever seen one of those at Lowe’s or whatever, so it’s not a very big wagon. And this is what he is, you know, carting around his family in and traveling around with the nomadic tribe. Yeah.
They’re just following around these animals that are looking for grazing land, places where they can set up and, you know, like an oasis or water. Right. But space isn’t the only issue. There’s other stuff that they have to deal with too. When we were with the nomads, we didn’t have any wall around us.
We had to be open and bare and, just be able to be available to them 247, because you don’t have any protection like, in a city where you have a fence or a wall. Talk about lack of boundaries. I don’t think there is such a thing as boundaries in a nomadic society. I think maybe for me, this is the one thing as an American that would be the most difficult thing, just to be able to have my space, my privacy, the place where I can recharge and just kinda relax. Yeah.
It’s not happening here. No. Where are you gonna go? You’re in the Sahara. Like, you can’t just walk.
I’m gonna go for a walk in the desert. Yeah. You’d die. Yeah. And, yeah, where would you go anyway?
I mean, it it once you see part of the desert, I guess that’s probably what most of it looks like, you know? What? So, I mean, that sounds really intense. And I think for a lot of folks listening, it would be like, that’s what I couldn’t handle. You know, if you’re introverted, the idea of never having privacy or an alone time would just be an incredible struggle.
But there was a huge benefit to being stuck out there just available to everybody. It’s he got to spend a lot of time learning language. And if you’ve never heard a language and there are no language schools and there is no textbook written on learning language, you have go old school and that looks like literally picking up a rock and saying, what is this? Yeah. So those are the words that he learns first.
Right? He learns the word, what is this? And then he goes around and picks things up, holds up a rock and says, what is this? And they tell him. So he’s starting to learn a lot of nouns.
Yeah. The problem is Like a baby, pretty much. That’s the method. Right? Total immersion.
And then he’s realizing, well, I gotta get some verbs here, right? So he takes the rock and he says, okay, this means rock, so, and then he just kinda throws it over and over again until they say, oh, okay, you mean throw the rock, and then he’s like, okay, that must mean throw. And so, if you can imagine learning a language where there is no language helper, you know, you pick up a stick, they say stick, then you throw the stick, throw the stick. Okay, I got the verb, I got the noun. Then you gotta get with the adjectives, you know, long stick, short stick, maybe it’s a twig, It’s incredibly complicated.
Yeah. And all this time as they’re learning the language, Anne makes this amazing discovery. I have a wife who is a wonderful linguist, and I could bring home what I learned and she could analyze it. And she, in language, found that the torics have a written language different from any script in the world. So they find out that the script is actually called Shafina.
Right. It comes from the 3rd century. It’s very rarely used, and they’ll explain why, but, you know, it’s very strange looking. Yeah. It actually kinda looks like Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Yeah. And that’s not the only problem. There’s another problem regarding this line. We non mother tongue speakers need, a lot of help in in in reading this language. The mother tongue speaker knows the words.
So it’s not nearly as difficult for them. Alright. So this show wouldn’t be possible without sponsors. And at this point in the show is where, if you wanna partner with us, we would put your ad. So if you wanna be a part of the show, you wanna partner with us, you like what we’re doing, you wanna be on our team, what have you, bringing this show to the world, then email us and let us know.
Alright. So Cash is super excited about the discovery of the script because he’s thinking, we can translate the scriptures into this. Right. And he starts asking people, including, like, UNESCO, the Peace Corps, people in the government and everybody says, no. Actually, they say phooey.
Yeah. He says they say it’s phooey and it’s because they think nobody understands it. There are no vowels. Right. It’s too confusing.
It’s difficult for, everyone to be able to understand what what you’re trying to say. So if you imagine for a second, could you understand a continental language, no vowels? And the answer is yes. I encourage you guys go online. You can mix up all the letters inside of English and only keep the first and the last letter the same and you will be able to understand it.
It’s fascinating. And the reason is it’s your mother tongue. But with the Touareg, they wouldn’t be able to understand this thing as far as everybody thought, but it was because it wasn’t their mother tongue. And they decide to go ahead and try this radical experiment. If you want to communicate something written, you do have to build a context.
If it’s familiar material to them, that’s not nearly as crucial. But if you’re telling the story of the raising of Jairus’ daughter, you want to be very careful when Jesus and Jairus were coming back to the house and it says they found the people crying because of the death of the daughter. The same vowels are used for greeting as for wailing. Daughter? No, that doesn’t work.
So, we just changed the word order around a little bit. Then when they read it, it was because of the death of the daughter, people were, and they immediately said, wailing. It’s amazing when you think about how important context is. Right? Just from the example she shared.
Yeah. You take one word and it becomes something totally different. The story means something totally different. And so they just had to be really careful about their wording, about their sentence structure. Well, they eventually take this translation of Jarius’ daughter and they begin to pass it out and they find out that people get it.
They understand it. And the radical experiment, it worked. And not only does it work, it actually takes off. People are buying these, tracks. I guess that’s how they put them in that form.
And people are reading them all over the place because it’s produced for them. But they say that in Africa, every piece of literature is read by 19 people because they don’t have anything to read. If I sold a 100 tracks, multiply by 19 and you will see how much that expanded the witness of the gospel. Some people are probably wondering why sell them, why not give them away. I’m sure that’s a question in people’s minds.
If you give them away, they’ve got no value whatsoever. If you didn’t have any value on them, they it. We sold them greatly subsidized. We were down to 2 pennies a page. And so they could get a whole track for 2 pennies.
And, they they were certainly willing to pay 2 pennies for it. So eventually, Cash and Anne are joined by a coworker who is a linguist. Yeah. That’s his specialty, and he actually does something remarkable with Anne’s work. Right.
It’s he translates the book of Mark. But, it was a beautiful book made out of a plastic that looked very much like the leather that the Tuaregs use for all of their things. The Tuaregs are considered the blue men of the desert because they wear a veil and it’s made of blue indigo cloth. It comes off on their face and so they look blue. They get it on their hands and when they’re reading a book then the blue gets on the page.
And we had plastic pages so they could just take a damp cloth and wipe the blue off. And the book was made so it would go in the pocket of a robe. We tried to figure as many things culturally as we could that would fit for them. So it was the right color, it was the right size, and it was washable. Yeah.
Something I had never really thought about is when you’re doing Bible translation, you’re not just even thinking about just the text, but you’re thinking about the design of the Bible. In this case, it would it had to be perfect for the nomad nomads. Because, like, imagine if it was a paper Bible, like, how long would it take? Honestly, how long would it take before, you know, on one of these nomadic trips, how long would it take before it was destroyed? I I don’t know what the sun would do to the pages or just the blue ink like he was talking about.
So the way that they did it, they paid very careful attention to every detail so that the Touareg would see this as their book, not something that was being introduced from the outside. So even though Cash took really, really great care in making this book for them, he’s still finding some obstacles in his way. But Cash doesn’t stop. Right? He doesn’t give up.
He actually finds out that speaking and teaching, that’s not the only form of communication. They would let us sing the gospel. They would not let me teach. If Cash said the same thing spoken, they would merely lift their veils and turn their heads and spit. To show their disgust.
They would tell us, we’ll put wood on the fire. We’ll stay here till tomorrow morning. Let her sing all night long. As long as she would sing, they would sit there and listen to it and clap and shout, at the concert on the dune. Hey, ladies.
I’m from, truth about Muslims podcast. Have you heard of it? Yeah. Okay. So we want you to read an ad for us.
Can you do that? You’ll be famous, like, world famous. It’ll be amazing. C I u? C I u.
C I u. C I u. C I u. I’m Kevin Kekaisen. Kevin in the world.
Yeah. Oh, wow. Fame. Lose fame. Lose fame.
Lose. Alright. CIU educates people from a biblical worldview to impact the nations with a message of a voice. Worker. We’ll do that again alongside I don’t feel like I’ll be so embarrassed.
Apparently, he’s also a gifted musician. He’s got the whole gamut, man. All the talents. He he he writes over a 100 songs explaining the teachings of Christ from, like, creation all the way to crucifixion all through singing and in the Touareg style. But it’s a unique style, something that you need to understand before we give you the sample that we have.
Right. So the the big deal is that there’s 2 singers because the main singer, when she sings or he sings, it is such an ordeal. It is so, consuming, you know, with their voices straining, that they need a backup singer. Yeah. Actually, the way that he explains this, he says it’s like opera and that you need to breathe because you’re singing so hard and so long that you need a moment to breathe and that’s what the backup singer does.
Yeah. And he calls them the filler. And these fillers, they come in and it oddly enough, it doesn’t even have to go with the song. It just has to give the main singer some time. And Anne actually started out as a filler singer for this guy who was the gifted linguist and the gifted poet and musician and just the renaissance man.
Right? I kinda don’t even know who this guy is, but they really speak highly of him. Kudos. It’s actually, Cash says that he was a miracle from God and so the Lord knows. But Anne started off as a filler for him and then eventually Anne takes on the role of singing as the lead singer and poet.
And so we ask, can we get a sample? And this is what we got. And they just loved Aminata, as she was called. She was one of the top 10 female singers on the Sahara Desert. Alright.
I mean, it’s a let’s hear it. I got are you gonna do the filler? I am trying to think of what what I remember the words of. You’ve got to realize it’s been a number of years. Yeah.
But none of us are gonna know. We’re not gonna know. We wouldn’t know anyway. I can remember the beginning of the song on creation, which was why our coworker said, Anne, I must have a second singer singer on this. I cannot do it by myself.
And so You would can imagine how long a creation song is. He listed off all the grasses and all the birds and all the. He was just great. And they love it. They that somebody somebody from the other world came here.
The chief of the priest group said, I can believe that Americans went to the moon because this lady can sing our music. That’s how powerful it was. Does he know the filler? He knows the filler. Alright.
I’m I’m gonna hear it. Let’s I’m so excited. Namahe la. Thank you. That was good.
Gretchen. You got that voice up there. Wow. That’s fantastic. Interesting enough, in a lot of different cultures, you know, beauty is different.
And one of those cases in this culture is that when voices crack when they’re singing, when they reach those high notes and they strain and they crack, it’s beautiful. And because Anne masters this way of singing among the Taureg and all the other things that they had done to respect the culture and the people, they eventually gained favor. And they gained favor with a chieftain who provides the land and the lake where they have their first baptisms. We had a chieftain who was very favorable to the gospel, and he would say, Gadigal, come here. Teach these people about Jesus.
So Kas does face an unlikely cultural barrier when it comes to baptizing the Touareg. And, of course, Touaregs have never been in underwater. They don’t do that, so to speak. And so they were apprehensive about being baptized underwater, and I had to give them the security and the confidence that it was alright, that nothing bad was going to happen to them. Though they’ve never seen that done before and though they never, had done it themselves.
That was, so I chose the strongest of the believers and the most mature of the believers to be the first, person. And, it was it worked out well for him. So I figured I had gotten the jump on the problem. There were 14 being baptized. When we got out in the water, I would say, have you put your faith in in Jesus Christ?
They would say, yes. And do you believe your sins are forgiven? Yes. And so it was quite, joyful. And some of them coming out of the water danced.
We don’t wanna mislead everybody. Not everybody was coming out of the water dancing and shouting. Actually, Cash and Ann said that a lot of the younger people, it was like they had watched a lot of sporting events and felt like if they were joyful about that, they should also be joyful about the Lord. So they they watched all this stuff. So they were the ones that were like, yes.
And I just think it’s really cool because, you know, culturally, you know that every moment after that when people become baptized, that’s what they’re probably gonna do because that’s what they’ve seen. And so now you’re going to have this shouting of yes and yes because, you know, our baptisms are nice. There’s, like, applause and people clap or people sing, you know, but, you know, and here you just have this sporting event. Yes. And I think that’s pretty cool.
So not only is it, like, everybody is excited. There’s one guy. He’s so excited. He wants to baptize himself. Now we had a man who was a polio victim and he his legs, didn’t work.
He had to crawl on his hands, so to speak. After he saw how you got baptized, he said, Gadigal, I’m gonna do it. And he went out by himself in the war. I said, no, Girolamo, you can’t do it by yourself. You’ve got to have somebody help you.
And, no, I’ll do it by myself. And I said, no. I’ve got to help you do it, because I didn’t want him to get water down his nostrils, and and that would be something Satan would be delighted to have happen in a situation like that. And so I insisted and he insisted and I insisted and he insisted, and finally, he let me baptize him. And he was one of the most powerful witnesses among the Torahs.
I mean, he really would talk to anybody about Jesus when they came within range of him. Shout. Shouting. Alright. I love this story about the guy with polio just wanting to baptize himself and wanting so badly to be baptized.
It reminds me of Bible stories. Right? The people that just so desperately want Jesus that that, you know, you have lepers shouting out Jesus, master, have mercy on us. You have blind man, shouting out Jesus, son of David. And it’s like this guy with polio, he just wanted baptism so badly that he was gonna dive right in there and come out and just be shouting for Jesus.
It just sounded right out of the Bible for me. It did. And I love Cash’s expression. He’s just like, no. You can’t.
You can’t. You just can’t do this, you know. He wants to help baptize the guy, and the guy’s like, I’m gonna do it. I’m just gonna go and do it. And I just thought, how comical it must have been for Cash because, you know, Cash is a jolly guy.
And so how much fun it must have been just this guy was so adamant about being baptized. It’s a beautiful thing. Yeah. And we don’t wanna give you the impression that everything about the Godbold story is, happy all the time. There’s difficulty.
And in episode 3, we’re gonna share some of the struggles that come. And I think it’s important for Christians to realize that when you start to see breakthrough, when you start to see God work in magnificent ways, you can also anticipate there’s going to be a backlash. Alright. So that’s what we’re gonna get into, next week. So here’s a clip from next week’s show.
Do you know Elizabeth, our daughter? Mhmm. Okay. One day one day, she was talking to me about it while he was in captivity. And, she said, dad, they’ve got our best cowboy.
And it was really a good expression that, we had the best man we had to represent us there with them. And, if anybody was gonna be able to take it, he would. Because there are just a lot of people who just couldn’t have stood 9 months of captivity in a little cornstalk hut, that’s all. But Steve could. So I hope you guys have been enjoying this series with Cash Godbolt.
We know we have, and we just want to encourage you guys to continue to to tune in, because I know that with these stories, as long series, maybe it’s not your cup tea, but I think that next week’s podcast is going to be absolutely amazing. Yeah. And be sure that you guys continue to spread the word. We really appreciate the reviews. You guys continue to share it on Facebook, and, as the listenership grows, it just is really encouraging for us.
So spread the word