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Understanding love, deception, language
Understanding love, deception, language Meditation: The Words We Think We Know
Monday, December 17, 2012 at 09:55AM 
Some time back--never mind how long ago--I said casually to a young woman, “the surest description of God is that of Father.” She recoiled in horror. Fear and grief passed across her face. Later I learned her father had been a man filled with violence and abuse toward to his daughters. Father meant betrayal, brutality, and perversion. Her experience and definition kept her from knowing the True Father: his tender care, his understanding, and deep love. Yet who could blame her?
Another occasion I watched a boy imitate the father he loved. A poor imitation it was. Filled with blustering pride the man-child bossed and ordered others about. He thought he was doing what fathers did--commanding, directing, and leading. To him, Father meant authority and power to lead. He was a child playing the back-yard version of war, brimming over with glory and bluster.
What if our definitions keep us from seeing the truth? What if our twisted experience has taught us the opposite of the deep meanings whispered by the Spirit? Deliver us from the things we think we know, because certainty is the enemy of discovery. We could embrace a deception, or in fear we could run away from the truth. God save us from the words we think we know. What if they keep us from the truth? Since those encounters I’ve wondered time and again how many words I have misunderstood, simply because I have one meaning planted firmly in my head, rooted in my heart.
Since those experiences I have kept a list of Bible words--words filled with promise, joy, deliverance, and hope--yet also capable of frightening me to the core, or leading me completely astray. My list of wonderful-yet-dangerous words? Here is but a sample of the words I think I know:
Family
Sister
Brother
Love
Church
Community
Mission
Calling
I’ve determined never to reject these words, because the Spirit has spoken them. I will not run from them. I’ve also determined to hold them loosely in order that I might return to them again and again, and be instructed by their multi-faceted wisdom.
The revealed wisdom of God sends us this sure warning: we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears . . . For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
Reader Comments (2)
Right on Ray!
Upon meditation of your words and tempered with a broken heart that our entire nation shares in this time of mourning I think I see now when those words are “wonderful” and when they are “dangerous”. It depends, as you so well described, totally on the perception of the person they are directed toward; not on the one who says them.
Today I’ve been asking God how a Muslim, a Christian, a Hatfield and a McCoy might perceive the word “family” according to the environment they were each raised in. I need His input because only He knows how each mind and heart was raised compared to how I was trained to perceive “family” limited to only the experience of my heart and my mind. This is most important to me at this moment because I don’t understand how or why we keep self-centeredly feuding with the rest of our mankind. I don’t see how we can ever communicate with one another if we’re each subject to only our unique understanding of each word shared.
Luke 10:27 works really well for me as tried and true. If I attempt to make a disciple of Jesus Christ using solely the words contained in that scripture I fail every time. If I see a neighbor (of any race, creed, religion or gender) unconscious in a ditch after having been mugged and I silently apply Luke 10:27 more often than not I succeed at my charter. It is by the fruits of our actions that our words are perceived as “wonderful” or “dangerous”.
If I try to whip and subjugate my children into love I fail. If I love my children I succeed in the example of my Father and Brother in Heaven.
“Church” and “Family” are wonderful when perceived as all inclusive as Jesus lived and taught. “Church” and “Family” are perceived as dangerous to the outsider when each is perceived as exclusively fighting words to be defended.
And while I am on the subject of “Family” I am tired of my Father in Heaven being perceived as loving the males more than the females in His family. It is not true even though that was the perception put forth in the words of the authors of the Bible. It was not God’s true attitude at creation. We were clearly created in Their image, male and female (Genesis 1:26,27). “Brother” throughout the New Testament is often singularly used to signify a fellow believer and (“politically correct” aside) it so belittles the equally “wonderful” love our Father in Heaven has for all His children in the each different form of our sister and brother siblings. “Brother” in such an exclusive usage in the Bible is a very dangerous and bigoted word when describing the all inclusive relationship with our “Father”.
There is no “Marriage” in Heaven as Jesus directly said. There is no gender, religious or racial bias tolerated in God’s kingdom for all citizens are consider by our Lord God as each unique and equally loved eternally. It is by God’s merciful grace that we are even allowed time to learn the value of inclusive love relative to exclusive bias. I hope, for each of our sakes, that we can overcome our self centeredness and grow to include all of God’s “Family” and not just the Christian Caucasian males.
There, I got that off my chest and I pray that my words are perceived in the inclusive and “wonderful” nature of God’s love that they are intended to be.
Thanks Ray, for sharing your “wonderful” words with us.
this is fantastic.
i've been in this place lately, thinking about the Luke 2 shepherds' reaction to the angel(s) materializing out of thin air. initially, they were terrified. it actually isn't clear if they ever got over their terror. what is clear, though, is that they believed God had spoken.
in the realm of personal experience, my encounters with God have not been terrifying. they are, most of the time, incredibly peaceful and warm. taking the bible characters into account, am i not experiencing Him correctly, or at all? or does that mean i've let the words of the Luke 2 angel, "fear not," really sink into my heart to the point where i thoroughly believe God isn't going to harm me or drop a piano on my head when he shows up? i really believe the latter.
i've been thinking a lot about how different biblical characters react differently to the manifest presence of God, and how i fit into that. i suppose what i've come to is that people approach God (or rather, he approaches them) with different assumptions, which are totally informed by their life experience.
i had a dad that constantly told me he loved me and was proud of me. i had a mother that, no matter what terrible thing i had confessed to her, never looked at me in disappointment.
the cool thing about the bible characters, though, is that God shows up to them anyway, no matter what they assume about Him: the terrified shepherds, the murderous paul who thought Jesus was evil, peter, joshua, moses, samuel, all of them! (an interesting one to think about is Adam and Eve, pre and post sin. their experience of God hadn't changed, but they reacted to His daily walk in the garden differently after eating the fruit vs. before. but, again, He showed up anyway.)
another piece of good news is that, even though they were terrified, the shepherds knew they were hearing from God. even though paul goes blind, he knew he had met God. even on the opposite end of the "miraculous" spectrum, the roman soldier, looking at the murdered Jesus, knew he was looking at the Son of God.
i'm comforted and confident in the fact that God is convincing. and i'm comforted that, no matter what i think about him (right or wrong), he shows up and affirms or convinces me otherwise.