When Old is New

“Doroga vroseeyoo. This means ‘Road to Russia.’” My tutor pointed to the textbook cover. “To know Russia, you must know Russian language.” 

And I also must know it to communicate in Moldova.

The first Russian person I ever met was my middle school piano teacher. A prolific musician, she fascinated me as much with her musical virtuosity as with her cultural background, and for the first time, I wanted to learn to speak Russian. I remember looking at the Cyrillic alphabet one day in hopes of learning to write to my teacher and turning away in dismay, daunted by symbols I had never seen. Now, ten years later, I try again, with mounting confidence.

Only sometimes I think I have too much confidence. That is, in attempting to speak Russian after having studied it for only six months.

I’ve learned quite a bit in those six months. I learned that I keep using the term of endearment for a man when I am trying to say the word another. I also keep mixing up the words next and last, which confuses my hearers considerably when I’m referencing days of the week. Once, I meant to tell my Russian teacher that I drink tea at cafés, but I ended up telling her that I’m an alcoholic. Another time, I meant to ask people to pray, but I ended up saying, “Let’s wash ourselves!” And another time, I meant to tell a friend that I understood what she told me about herself, but I ended up saying, “I’m sorry you’re fat.” 

Don’t ask.  

It’s incredible, the grace people show me up here.

From these snapshots of my journey on the “Road to Russia,” you can now see why I grow considerably overjoyed in the moments when I can communicate meaningfully. My excitement at these new linguistic connections is justified. And since they are few and far between, yes, they are still “new” to me.

Living in Moldova, I feel that I have plunged into a world of newness. But almost as soon as the sense of newness settles over me, truth breaks in, reminding me that all this is new only to me.

In America, my sense of “old” as pertains to buildings, streets, and traditions is circa 1776. But over here, “old” goes back into the AD 1000s. Even the city of Chişinău, where I live, was founded in 1436—that’s 340 years before the United States. It’s staggering for me to think that America’s been around about three centuries less than Chişinău has. 

The language, too, is nothing new.

Russian is ancient. Though it has undergone many variations, a form of Russian was recorded as early as 880 AD, when Old East Slavic was established as the official language uniting the ethnic groups in what are now Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Slavic gave way to Church Slavonic, which led to mediaeval Russian and eventually to the literary and conversational Russian used today. All in all, I’m not discovering anything truly “new” when I study Russian. It’s only new to me. 

Yet all too soon, newness wears off.  Enter familiarity. 

I am slowly growing accustomed to the pace of life in Moldova. Things that used to baffle me I can now pass by with a muted smile, or sometimes with no additional attention at all. And the Russian language, with its curlique-d alphabet, all too soon told me that its letters formed words which formed sentences which obeyed rules of grammar which are as foreign to me as their country of origin.    

The difficulty didn’t wane with the newness. Instead of remaining new and challenging, it morphed into being old and challenging.

And so I slipped into the delusion of thinking that to solve the depressing feeling of waning newness, I need something else that is new. 

When I first realized that studying Russian retained (nay, increased) a high level of difficulty, I had unvocalized urges to find some quick method of language-learning or begin afresh with a different language. Yes, I’ve studied second-language acquisition and the interaction of language and culture, both leading me to understand the process I’m undergoing, but sometimes the thing itself feels different in context than it sounds in academia.

Initially my thoughts were at odds as I struggled with the duality of systematically pressing on while still wanting a quick fix. When I wax languid, the last thing I want to hear is some version of “keep hanging in there!” All the quotes, rhymes, and ancient proverbs about trying harder that I can recall I can recite until I’m blue in the face, but when I’m trudging through difficulty, I crave something that will re-spark my passion—or at least lessen the load. And  when I reach that point, my tendency is to assume that I need something new.

Proof of this is what transpired during my recent Russian lesson. 

In February, I worked on a reading exercise in my Russian textbook which included a children’s story. I checked the cover of the book again. No, this book was definitely compiled for university students, not for younger kids. Why are we having ‘story time’? (Later I realized that a children’s story was chosen as a means of introducing learners to aspects of Russian culture while keeping the grammar simple.) 

After reading through the story, my tutor spoke again.

“You know zis story?” “Nyet.” “In our culture, very important part of life is story. We tell children story, and all children know. Zis is Russian story. You studied French, da?” “Da.” “Then you know story of frogs? Children’s story?” “Nyet.” “You not know? It is very famous, very interesting story. It is old, from Aesop, I sink. My parents tell me when I was little. I tell you.”  

Inwardly I chuckled: I’m twenty-three and my teacher wants to tell me a children’s story? 

She began speaking in Russian. My smirk fell and I began listening intently because I was afraid she was going to check for comprehension when she finished. I’ll include my own re-telling here (embellished with more words than I know in Russian):

One day, two frogs hopped through a farmyard. They vaulted all around the farm, joyously chasing one another. As they sailed through the air on a particularly big leap, they noticed a large milk pail ahead of them. Unable to slow down or speed up, they landed with a splash in the milk. The pail was deep, and the frogs could not jump high enough to get out. They kicked and kicked, but to no avail. When they stopped kicking, they sunk into the milk, unable to breathe. One frog said to the other, “I can’t kick anymore. And it’s no use. The pail’s too tall and the milk’s too deep. We’ll never get out.” “Don’t give up! Keep trying!” Exhorted the other frog, but his words were spent in vain: in his exhaustion, the first frog gave up, stopped kicking, and surrendered to death by suffocation. The other frog, seeing his friend’s death, shouted to himself, “I will not give up! I will not stop trying!” With labored breathing and tired legs, the frog continued moving. His kicking slowed to a snail’s pace, but he didn’t stop; he reasoned that some motion was better than no motion, in this case. Soon paddling became harder; he wasn’t sure if his legs were giving up or if the milk were becoming firmer. Soon, he knew that both were true: his legs were tiring, but the milk was definitely hardening. He was no longer swirling water as much as he was pressing his feet into a viscous substance. Then, the thing itself: he had churned the milk into butter! He marveled at the work of his feet and walked to the top of the butter heap. He turned round to take one last look at his friend, lamenting his preventable end. Then, he leapt with liberation out of the pail and into the world of the farmyard.     

And that was it. I sat there, staring at my tutor, wet-eyed and grinning. It wasn’t just the feat of translation my brain accomplished that filled me with ecstasy. 

It was the message of the story itself. What may have been a children’s bedtime story had spoken profoundly and directly to my situation.

I sit here, weeks later, pondering why that story had such a penetrating impact on me that day. Reflecting on those moments fills me with wonder but also with a sense of the ironic because everything about the situation was “old.” Old lesson format, old story, old moral. The language was a “new” package, granted, but underneath was the same message I have heard since childhood. As I sought “newness” as a solution, what really revived me was a returning to the old.

My tutor didn’t ask me comprehension questions that day. She knew by my reactions I had understood. She probably didn’t realize the profundity it carried for me, though, because I could tell by the look on her face that she was surprised at how well her re-telling was received.

And that’s okay.

-  -  -  -  -  

The day I heard the “Frog and the Milk Pail” story, I realized that I often mistakenly equate hearing a message with taking it to heart. And those are two entirely different things.

Sometimes we can hear a message for so long that our senses become deadened to the truth it carries. Maybe when we first heard it we had no frame of reference for its implications, so we misinterpreted it, or with the best of intentions we set it aside for a later time when we thought it would be more applicable. And then when areas of our lives need reviving, we search for a new message because the potency of the old has long faded. 

Sometimes what we need isn’t something new: it’s something old. The Israelites, our Scriptural model for God’s dealings with His people today, learned many a time about the potency of “old” words and concepts. The prophet Jeremiah sharply illustrates this lesson for God’s chosen people in the 35^th chapter of his book. The events in this chapter took place during the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, only a few years before Judah was invaded by the Babylonians. Throughout Jeremiah’s prophetic ministry, the people and leaders of Israel persisted in idolatry as God repeatedly warned them through his prophets that a time of judgment was coming. Jeremiah prophesied for around 40 years to his countrymen, filling up the longest book in the Bible with many of the same messages: the need for repentance, the threat of coming judgment, and the promise of restoration. In chapter 35, God contrasts the Rechabites’ obedience with Judah’s reticence to obey the messages they’d already been given.

The Rechabites, though not Israelites, were a nomadic people group on friendly terms with God’s chosen people, and many Rechabites lived with or at least near them. The Rechabites traced their lineage through Rechab, a Kenite (who came from Moses’ father-in-law). Rechab was the father of Jonadab, a pious man who aided King Jehu in destroying Baal worship in Israel. Zealous for the God of Israel, he laid out several injunctions for his people group, one of which was abstinence from wine.

God told Jeremiah to bring the Rechabites into the house of the Lord and give them wine to drink. The Rechabite men came, saw the wine pitchers, and refused Jeremiah’s offer, citing Jonadab’s words as their reason:

                “We will not drink wine, for Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, commanded us, saying, ‘You shall not drink wine, you or your sons, forever’” (Jeremiah 35:6).

In verses seven through eleven, the Rechabites go on to explain other rules they observe because they “obeyed the voice of Jonadab the son of Rechab, [their] Father” and “ha[d] done according to all [he] commanded them” (vv. 8a, 11b). 

Roughly 250 years before Jeremiah prophesied, the pious Jonadab had set forth these guidelines. Jonadab was no longer living when Jeremiah brought the Rechabite men into the house of the Lord. His words? Pretty old.  

The Rechabites were obeying the words of a leader they had never met, but the Israelites were repeatedly rebelling against the words of the Lord their God who daily intersected their reality?

And that was God’s point. 

The age of the words doesn’t matter. The concepts they embody are still relevant and applicable.

Whether a truth-statement was spoken two millenniums ago or is uttered first today, truth is truth and remains as such. God’s words are not tainted with time. His meaning is not altered simply because we live in cultures that are worlds apart from those in which the writers of Scripture were inspired.

Though the message the Lord spoke to me through a children’s story and the message the Lord spoke to the people of Judah through Jeremiah are unalike, the uniting factor is their “oldness.” Their words encase truth that does not fade with time.

So instead of asking, What else are You saying, God? Why don’t we ask, What have You been saying already that we’ve missed?

Sometimes we need the old-new. Sometimes our hearts have to be chiseled-on by disappointment and difficulty until enough hardness has been chipped away, allowing for a renewed receptivity to the message we needed to hear all along. 

And when our hearts are moved and softened by the words of the Lord, even when they are words we’ve heard countless times before, new life springs up. Sometimes it takes dying to pride. Sometimes it takes a willingness to admit that the understanding we previously derived from a biblical passage was at best patchy, and that it deserves another and more thorough run-through. 

May we not search for newness any more ardently than we scour the Scriptures for His “old” words. May we ask the Lord to search our hearts and illumine them to understand “old” truths in new ways.  

This is, if you will, a different type of new. 

And when old is new, we discover that those things we desired from something “new” are actually the effects of taking “old” truths to heart.

When old is new, we realize that the truth God spoke from of old, He still speaks within our realm of time and space and distance.

When old is new, the Holy Spirit has not only illumined our understanding but empowered us with the reviving direction and motivation we so desperately need. 

As for now, you’ll find me back to the books—specifically, the Bible. And that Russian textbook.

Relishing old newness,

Renée