Fridays, Peace, and Pride

I now have a "lost in translation" story to add to the books of them before me. Aside from announcing in my Norwegian language class earlier this fall that I "straddle" the bus instead of "ride" the bus, I haven't had that many slip ups.

In September, I decided to teach myself guitar so that I could help out leading worship. By November, I was struggling through songs but playing nonetheless. Since then I've been playing more and more and felt confident to start leading some songs in Norwegian. Sunday night was the first time I lead a song in Norwegian. It was at our student service. I only had to mumble my way through one part and felt pretty good about it afterwards. Tonight we had a prayer meeting at Brett and Cortney's house. We usually start off with a time of worship where I am playing guitar. With my new found confidence in singing in Norwegian, I decided to play that song again. Because it was a new song in my repertoire, we didn't have the lyrics on our normal sheet of music for people. Right before the meeting started, I took a few minutes to type up the words to this song and printed out a few copies for the evening. We had already sung a few songs when I started playing "Jesus Du Viste Veien" The first verse went fine [although looking back on the sheet now, I am finding several typos]. I start singing the second verse, and the mood of the room started to change. I look up to see that everyone is looking, pointing, smiling, and Kelly is trying hard to control a fit of laughter. Soon everyone is rolling in laughter. I stop playing, assuming it was something that I said while I was singing or the way I pronounced one of the words. With my face hiding behind my guitar to hide my embarrassment, I ask them what it was I said that made them laugh so hard. They assured me that it wasn't what I said that they were laughing at rather what I had written.

So the text was supposed to say:
Jesus du gav meg livet, Du gav meg fred

Which means:
Jesus you give me life, you give me peace

When I was typing up the lyrics I wrote:
Jesus du gav meg livet, Du gav meg fredag

Which means:
Jesus you give me life, you give me Friday

As if this weren't embarrassing enough, later on in the song I accidentally wrote "Jess" in a spot where "Jesus" was supposed to be. Word to the wise, never substitute your name in for Jesus' name in a worship song. It just doesn't go over that well.

On a slightly less embarrassing note, here is a video of me singing and playing at the Open Mic Night we had last Friday (oh how that word haunts me now). Hope you enjoy :)