We have a new booklet! – well, not exactly, but we have a new printing of a timeless piece of material – The Life.

I say ‘timeless’, but it has actually gone through a few translations (since 1966!) – from English into better English. I once ended up, for a little while, on a committee that were editing it. The experience gave me a crash course in the hard work they do in spirituality, theology and Greek even, that I hadn’t bargained for.

The process starts off innocently enough. Before long you’ll want to mention Jesus’ statement in John 10:10 about giving us an ‘abundant life’. Sounds like a good idea doesn’t it? Of course we don’t call it ‘the abundant life’ nowadays do we? Not in the circles I move in, anyway. The solution ought to be easy – just check the modern translations – like the New International Version. But they mostly translate the word as ‘full’.

At this stage I had a sweaty moment when I thought that maybe I got my Greek wrong and had been leading people up the garden path all the years. I checked the original and there it was, safe and sound, ‘abundant’. (John had the option of using the word for ‘full’, which he didn’t use, preferring this word instead which means ‘having way more than enough’). But how do you say this in one English word?

The introduction to my NIV Bible said, ‘Names of translators and editors may be secured from the New York International Bible Society, PO Box…’ and I was tempted to write and ask them if they had no better ideas for John 10:10! Then I realised that these good brothers and sisters in Christ were trying, just like the rest of us, to find modern English words to describe a concept unfamiliar to modern people.

In Ireland we must have a dozen words for rain (‘soft day’, ‘drizzle’, ‘mizzle’, ‘there’s heat in the back of it’, ‘sheets’, ‘stair-rods’). But in the Sahara do people have the capacity in their own language, to discuss rain? The idea of having life from Jesus that gives so much that you can dish out extra to other people, is foreign to our culture’s mind. So what do we do with our teaching? Give up? (you know the answer to that).

Thankfully, the Bible equips us for every good work, even translation. The New Testament is replete with plenty of context to build up the idea of an overflowing life. We can give this precious gift of understanding to our culture. That’s because we have an abundant life! Eventually I switched from theological dictionaries to the Thesaurus to get help with defining ‘abundance’. New options suddenly appeared – ‘loads, heaps, umpteen, swarm, profuse, overflowing, galore (how about the ‘galore’ Christian life?!) thick with, teeming’. Now that’s more like it.

The Life has the task of summarising our progress in Christian life. The first Agapé/Campus Cruade staff who came to Dublin to explain all this, first briefed me on the phone while I was sitting at the laboratory bench in the Moyne Institute of Preventive Medicine in Trinity College. I was amazed at all they planned to cover in the schedule, and said so. ‘Just write this down’, they said.

What a consequential phone call! Amazingly, that lab bench is still there. You can see it if you look through the railings on Nassau Street, directly across the road from the Mexican burrito place. Sometimes when I’m in that part of town I still check, just to be sure!