Southeast Asia · August 24 – September 4, 2026
OBT Consultant-in-Training Workshop, Psalms

He had the melody and he had the words in his own language, and when the room was ready he stood up to sing Psalm 1 for the first time in public. He nearly could not get through it.

What had happened, he explained afterward, was that he started hearing it. Not as the text he had been working on all week, but as a description. The psalm opens by setting one kind of person against another — the one who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, and the wicked themselves, chaff that the wind drives away. Sung in his own language, in a musical form his community already knows, that description stopped being a general statement about two ways of living. It became a statement about people he could name.

He said afterward that he wanted his people to know the truth of God’s word, and that he wanted it more than he had two weeks earlier.

Five language teams came to that workshop with their musicians and translators, to work through Psalms 1 and 13 alongside consultants-in-training. The workshop is built on a claim that sounds soft until you watch it happen: that a translator has to be moved by a psalm before he can carry it into another language, and that the way to be moved is to internalize it, to live with it until it is held rather than read.

He internalized Psalm 1 for a week. Then he opened his mouth to sing it and could barely finish.