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This is the conclusion to, Faith and My Fear of a Foreign Language . . .

Working her way down my row, she reached the person behind me–I was next.  Fear, fright, and flight all kicked in at once, and I jumped up out of my seat and ran to the back door.  “Ni Wei Li, where are you going?” called my professor.  I looked at her, stuck my finger to a tooth and told her I had a dentist appointment!  I lied.  Walking down the hall away from the classroom, I said, “Lord that was terrible; I’m never going back!!!”  And for two weeks I was in turmoil not wanting to go back but struggling with the feeling that that Lord wanted me there.  I went back on a Friday.  The professor had already figured out what had happened.  During that class, the professor comes over and stands beside me with her hand on my shoulder.  “Class, class, I want your attention!”  All the students stopped writing and looked up at the two of us.

“Class, class, I want your attention!”  All the students stopped writing and looked up at the two of us.  “Ni Wei Li here is afraid of what all of you think about his Chinese, so everyone, please be patient with Ni Wei Li.”   I was humiliated and felt stupid!  It was hard enough to come back to a college class after missing two weeks and then she did THAT to me!  In my heart I prayed, “Lord, that does it!  I’m not coming back for sure!!!!! No way, NEVER!!!”  The whole weekend I was in turmoil and again struggled with myself and the feeling that the Lord wanted me there taking Chinese.  I gave in; I was back in class on Monday and for the next few weeks, I had to work my rear off trying to catch up with the rest of the class.

As nothing short of a miracle from the Lord, I got through four quarters of Chinese.  I started debating if I should take a fifth quarter because I began feeling like I would never make it to China as a missionary.  Becoming a bit depressed over this, one day I found myself in a Christian bookstore.  As I was browsing the book racks, I saw a book about a pioneer missionary to China named Jonathan Goforth.  The book was titled, Goforth of China, so I purchased the book and read the story.  I had read a lot about China since I started my Chinese studies, and as far as missionaries went, Hudson Taylor who started the China Inland Mission had been my missionary hero to China.  But there were also things about Goforth’s life I could relate to, and he became my new missionary hero with Hudson Taylor close behind.  Both Goforth and Taylor were contemporaries working in different areas in China back during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

I was inspired by Goforth’s life but was still struggling about taking more Chinese.  Around that time, my wife and I were invited to a wedding for one of her friend’s that was going to be held a few hours from where we lived.  On our arrival, we were told we would be staying overnight with some friends of theirs that were retired missionaries that had served some thirty years in Viet Nam.  The couple welcomed us and gave us an upstairs room for the night.  The wedding would be the next day.

I was sitting on the side of the bed getting ready for bed and got to staring at an old tintype photo on the top of a dresser.  I was thinking to myself, “That old lady looks really familiar.”  Then I started thinking, “She sure looks a lot like the picture I saw of Jonathan Goforth’s wife in his book.”  Over on a table I noticed a really old Bible–except it had Chinese on it!  I jumped up, ran over, grabbed the Bible, and opened the front cover.  Inside, hand written, was the name Jonathan Goforth!  I nearly fell over!  He had lost his first Chinese Bible during the Boxer Rebellion in China when he was attacked by a mob and left for dead.  It’s estimated that around the year 1889, several hundred missionaries and over 32,000 Chinese Christians were killed by the Boxers.  After he survived, a Bible society presented him with a new Chinese Bible, the one I was holding.

That was too much for me!!!!!  I yanked my clothes back on, ran down stairs, and started calling for the old missionaries.  The wife came out of their bedroom and asked if I was ok.  I blurted out, “What’s all that business about Jonathan Goforth upstairs in our room???”  She looked at me smiling and said, “I’m his great-granddaughter.”  That experience did a number on me, and I signed up for the fifth quarter of Chinese.  The following is so typical of God–to go beyond what we expect.  Not long after, a Bible publisher was hosting a banquet in our city, and the country of focus that year was China.  My wife’s uncle who was associated with the Bible publisher knew of our interest in China and had invited us to the banquet.  Sitting down at the banquet table, we said hi to her uncle and to the two men sitting with him.  Then her uncle turned to us and said, “I would like to introduce you to  Hudson Taylor III and Hudson Taylor IV.”   I had to fight back tears.

By the time I had gotten into my sixth quarter of Chinese, we had gone from three classes of thirty students each studying Chinese down to eight of us.  We were considered to be the next round of Chinese translators and every other week an officer from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) would come in and pass out applications or other promotional literature.  One day my professor, the one who had humiliated me back in my first Chinese class, came to me.  She said, “Ni Wei Li, I want you to know that you have an above average ability to learn Chinese characters, even among the Chinese!”  By the eighth quarter, I was doing an independent study in Chinese, because at that time, I had taken all the Chinese the university offered.

Walking down the hall one day in the East Asian Language Department, I heard someone call my Chinese name.  Turning around, it was my Chinese professor for my advanced studies.  He was the head of the East Asian Language Department and had been responsible for the department receiving several national awards.  He also was an honorary chairman of the Taipei Institute of Linguistics in Taiwan.  He said, “Ni Wei Li, you are one of my “A” students, and if you want to go to the Taipei Institute of Linguistics, I will be happy to write you a letter of recommendation!”  All I could think as we parted was, “I’m humbled Lord!  How far you have brought me–from fearing a foreign language to embracing it!  You did it all because if I had had my way, I would have quit the day I ran out of the classroom.  Thank you, Lord; I now love Chinese characters and would have missed out on so much!!  Thank you, Jesus, for conquering the fear in my heart!  You knew what was best for me, and You knew it from the beginning.  Thank you.”

I will boast only in the LORD; let all who are discouraged take heart.  Come, let us tell of the LORD’s greatness; let us exalt his name together.  I prayed to the LORD, and he answered me, freeing me from all my fears.  Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy; no shadow of shame will darken their faces. Psalm 34:2-5 (NLT)

Copyright © 2010 by William D. (Nick) Nichols

The following events have pretty much been spread throughout my life . . .

In my life I’ve had two GREAT fears–one was math and the other was learning to speak a foreign language.  As for language, I even had a problem with learning my own language, English!  In middle school I would have to get up in front of the class and on the blackboard “diagram” all the parts of a sentence.  I would have rather faced off a pack of wild, rabid, snarling and snapping wolves than to diagram a sentence in front of the class!  I felt like all those comma splices and dangling whatevers were gonna kill me!

To make matters worse, my English teacher in middle school was also the Spanish teacher.  The first year in English class when she would get upset with me, she would yell at me in Spanish and make me stay after school in her Spanish classroom.  The next year when I had to take Spanish and she would get upset with me, she would yell at me in English and make me stay after school in her English classroom.  As a result, I developed this fear/hate relationship with language–including my own.

So it was with fear and trembling that I stood up from my knees after praying while at the Bible college I was attending in Canada, with the thought that the Lord wanted me to go to my state college back in the States and study Chinese!!  I knew little to nothing about China.  I wasn’t even sure where it was located.  That was because I was not a good student in elementary school where I should have learned this in geography class.

The next day I was in the lobby of the administration building and remembered the large map of the world they had framed on the wall.  Walking over to it, I thought I would see exactly where China was located.  I stood in front of the map looking at the line boundary marking out the location of the country.  In an instant, the whole country suddenly turned into Chinese faces; I was seeing the Chinese from the waist up all crowded within the borders of China.  They were crying, wringing their hands, and they looked confused, not knowing what to believe; they looked hopeless and full of despair.  The image was so sudden and so intense I stepped back and then looked to see if anyone else saw what I was seeing.  Nobody was staring at the map, and the emotion was too intense for me, so I had to walk away and then began wondering if I was going nuts seeing stuff!

That happened near the end of the spring semester; shortly after that, we left Canada to return to my home state.  Not long after, I stopped by to see my mom to tell her I would be taking Mandarin Chinese that fall quarter at the nearby state college.  She started crying!  She told me that the day I was born while still in the hospital, she felt the Lord impress upon her that I would be a missionary to China and that my middle name David was not from my father’s middle name of David.  Instead, my middle name was from David Olsen, a missionary that had been martyred in China in the 1940s.  I was speechless, and she sat there crying happy tears.

In the fall quarter, my first day of Chinese class was okay, and I was given the Chinese name Ni Wei Li.  I also discovered, unlike all other languages, Chinese doesn’t have an alphabet!  You basically have to learn one Chinese character for each word.  Thankfully, I survived the first day.  The next few days things were warming up as we started learning Chinese sounds and words.  My fear/hate language thing was on the rise inside me.  I was only there because I felt the Lord wanted me there.  The next week terror was settling in because this was when we were to start answering her questions in Chinese in front of everyone!  There were thirty students in my  class, and I sat near the front on the far side–far from where she started the questioning.  She methodically worked her way from student to student, row by row.  She came to my row, and I broke out into a sweat.

Working her way down my row, she reached the person behind me–I was next.  Fear, fright, and flight all kicked in at once, and I jumped up out of my seat and ran to the back door.  “Ni Wei Li, where are you going?” called my professor.  I looked at her, stuck my finger to a tooth and told her I had a dentist appointment!  I lied.  Walking down the hall away from the classroom, I said, “Lord that was terrible; I’m never going back!!!”  And for two weeks I was in turmoil not wanting to go back but struggling with the feeling that that Lord wanted me there.  I went back on a Friday.  The professor had already figured out what had happened.  During that class, the professor comes over and stands beside me with her hand on my shoulder.  “Class, class, I want your attention!”  All the students stopped writing and looked up at the two of us.   (to be continued . . . )

Copyright © 2010 by William D. (Nick) Nichols   [Part 1 of 2]

The following is a true story in my life and is dedicated to a bright young friend who also has a fear of math . . .

On entering state college, I had two GREAT fears–the fear of math and the fear of learning a foreign language, but my fear of math by far surpassed the other.  In high school, I did terrible in all my math classes.  Solving problems in front of the class on the blackboard was a constant source of embarrassment and humiliation. I had not been raised to think in terms of excelling academically; my father was a hard-working gray iron foundry man, and my mother was a secretary.

After accepting Jesus into my heart, I was convinced the Lord wanted me to go to college.  I attended two colleges before my final and third college.  At the first college I met my wonderful wife; a profound gift from God!  At the second college I met an exceptional brother in the Lord who became a lifelong friend.  But at my third college, I had to face my fears as I entered the sciences.

My major required that I take a quarter of advanced algebra/trigonometry and two quarters of calculus.  That was a terrifying thought to me, but after coming to know Jesus, my confidence was in the Him and not in myself.  Since I had not had math for so long, I was required to take two remedial (refresher) courses in algebra and trigonometry.  As I prayerfully and fearfully approached that first course, I was surprised to discover the algebraic equations I had to solve had become like little puzzles, little games to solve. And to my shock, I started having fun with math!

In both remedial courses, I received an “A,” but as so often happens in a life of faith, I hit a roadblock.  The next math course that counted towards my major was advanced algebra and trigonometry. The problem was that in my last remedial math course, we never got to the part on trigonometry, and 80 percent of this class was focused on advanced trigonometry, and I had also never taken it in high school!  After an incredible struggle of trying to catch up, I ended up with a “D” for the course, but I needed a “C” to go on to calculus for my major.  I prayed, “Lord, what do I do now?? I can’t go on any further with my major!”  The Lord seemed to quietly say to my heart, “Trust me.”

Later I went to the administration building to sign up for my classes for the next quarter.  I didn’t know what to do about my “D” and taking calculus.  The registrar signed me up for my other classes and then pulled out a copy of the students’ grades from the advanced algebra/trigonometry class.  Placing the paper on the table, she ran her finger down through the names, stopping at mine.  I felt sick and embarrassed. She turns to me and says, “Looks like a “C” to me” and entered my name for calculus!

This was back in the days before good copiers, and what she had was a copy of a copy of a copy, each worse than the last. I looked down at the copy and was astonished to see next to my name a crease from one of the copies right through my letter grade.  The “D” really did look like a “C”!  And before I could do anything, she handed me my approved class schedule and started helping the next person!  Well, that quarter I got a “C” in calculus.  In my second quarter of calculus, I got a “B.”  And who knows, had I taken a third quarter, I might have gotten an “A.”  (Chuckle.)

So where did the math lead me after college?  I ended up as an environmental chemist at our main environmental state laboratory for fourteen years.  Lots of math and statistics there.  Later, a friend of my wife asked me if I would teach a Business Math course at a local community college.  I did, and loved it!  After that, I studied and passed all five Amateur Radio licensing exams that involved a lot of electronic circuit and radio transmission calculations for both analog and digital.  And at my last job in our state division of air pollution control, I used a database of jet engine efficiencies from Paris, France, combined with the same mathematical model used by NASA in the space program to calculate our state’s first ever emission inventory for all the aircraft in our state.

Looking back on my life, I see that God has this way of taking our fears and weaknesses and AMAZING us . . . but only if we trust Him . . . and only if we let Him.

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding.  Seek his will in all you do, and he will direct your paths.” –Proverbs 3:5-6  (NLT)

Copyright (c) 2010 by William D. (Nick) Nichols