Every language we add is a door opening onto a room we did not know was there. Someone writes from a place we could not have found on a map, and says the words arrived in the tongue their mother used.
What adding a language actually involves
It is not translation. That is the first thing people get wrong, and it is the thing that would sink the project if we let it.
Prayer that has been rendered word-for-word out of English sounds like prayer that has been rendered word-for-word out of English. It has to be made by people who pray in that language, with clergy who can say whether it is right, which is why the mission works through partners rather than through a translation desk.
The arithmetic runs the other way too
There are more than seven thousand living languages. We have ten.
I do not find that discouraging, though I understand why it reads that way written down. I find it clarifying. It means the work is not nearly finished, and that is a better thing to know than the alternative.
Which ones next
The honest answer is that we do not entirely choose. The requests arrive, and where a request arrives alongside someone willing to help make it properly, that is usually the next one.
It is a less strategic process than a man with my training would ordinarily defend. It has also, so far, been right more often than my planning would have been.
A boy who asked for languages
At seven I asked, among other things, for more languages. I meant it as a means — I thought languages were how one got an education and a job.
They turned out to be the point rather than the means, and I have no way to describe that except as a prayer answered more literally, and more slowly, than the person praying it had intended.