When NavPress invited me to do this, Jan and I prayed about it for a year, because I knew I couldn’t do this and be a pastor. I finally decided that I was 58 years old and had been in this church for nearly thirty years, so we thought maybe this was what we were going to do. I had done Galatians and Matthew and many of the Psalms, which I had been accumulating for twenty years. We had been invited to Pittsburgh to be writer/pastor in residence for a year. It was a wonderful place for this; there is a small Presbyterian seminary there.
I was doing Romans, and my editor called me up one day and said, “Eugene, what in the world has happened to you, this is not what we started out doing?” I said, “Well, I am not in a very congenial place – everybody likes me, they are nice to me, and I respect them. I feel like these professors are all smarter than I am; they are all sitting on my shoulders critically looking at what I am doing. That is what professors do. I was just inhibited; I was getting very wooden, very literalistic.
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He said, “Just let loose; if you go too far astray I will pull you back. You don’t need a team of twelve horses to hold you in.” When he did that I was free. I didn’t worry about what they said – or what I imagined they might say, because they were all very supportive and generous. I was back in my imagination, in my book, and in the hospital, and in visiting people in their family rooms. It restored my imagination to where I really belong in my vocation.
The academic world is not a good place to do translation. You have lost your imagination, or your feel for colloquial language – not just language, but personal relationships. There are times you are doing this – it took me twelve years – when you sit and look at the word for a half an hour, an hour, sometimes all day long, and say, “How do I do this? What does it mean?”
Jan was reading from The Message the other day and said, “Dolphin skins? Where did you come up with dolphin skins?” This is one of the things in the making of the tabernacle. I told Jan I sat for a whole day looking at that word; the scholars argue over what it was, it was the only time it occurs, but they were in touch with seafaring people in those days and there was a lot of trade along the Mediterranean. It just seemed like the right thing, and of course it catches your eye, too.
I often felt like it was effortless. I had been doing this my whole life. It’s like when you have been an athlete – a baseball player hits a home run, and they ask how he did that. I don’t know how I did it; I have just been doing it my whole life, and every once in awhile it connects. So in one way, doing The Message felt very much in continuity with what I had been doing as a pastor. So it pleases me when pastors refer to it; a lot of pastors do, almost no professors do.