“Should” is a word with real, live uses
Granted, it’s seen its share of abuses ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Part of 1 Corinthians 16 is as a good a motto as one can find: “Do everything in love.” Since so much of my life comprises words, and since the biblical proverbialists, Jesus, and James all emphasize the power and importance of our words, I’m going to provisionally subset the motto to concentrate its effect: “Say everything in love.”
Cheerful, curious, grateful, harmonious, sympathetic, brotherly, humble. That’s what I want to be.
The word of the year this year is “get to”: Everything I do, I get to do. (Hat tip: Ethan.)
This is what self-exhortation (in this case, to be a better listener) sometimes sounds like in my house.
“The secret to faith is to have two loves: one for God and the other for whoever happens to be standing in front of you at any given time” (Eloy Cruz to Jimmy Carter, as quoted by Randall Balmer in The Christian Century).
Listen, Merriam-Webster: You descriptivists do good work. It’s important we have maps of the lay of our linguistic land as it lies. But don’t purport to explain to the world that prescriptivists are only interested in “‘correctness’ set forth in ‘rules’ that [we] imagine.” Just like poorly developed roads, a poorly designed language (as I concede every language is to some degree) sometimes leads to confusion, frustration, and hazards. To suggest prescriptivists are always wrong to do what they do is the equivalent of saying city planners are always wrong to do what they do.
Misdevelopment of the land has consequences. So it is with lexicons—especially when the words in question are of moral value. Consider “forgive.” If “forgive” is “actually used,” as you write, “by writers and speakers of the English language,” to include by definition reconciliation, forgetting, and anger abatement, which in some circles, although thankfully not quite in your dictionary, resentment being different from anger, it does, then descriptivism can be guilty of abetting the deformation of our moral vocabularies and thus the persistence of harm, including domestic abuse and white supremacy, because despite your protestation, people look to your publications as a guide.
We need people alerting us to semantic hazards and dead ends.
“All a man’s ways are pure in his eyes, but the LORD takes the spirit’s measure” (Proverbs 16:2). The first part isn’t true of everyone all the time. But it’s probably true of everyone some to most of the time. And certainly very often true of me. Lord, help us to discern.
I cannot reliably control my circumstances. I cannot at all control other people. But I can control my (current) self. Herein lies happiness.
A truism, perhaps. But one worth repeating, especially to someone like myself who scores, mostly to his chagrin, as an 8 on the Enneagram.
Proverbs also very frequently locates wisdom in how we receive correction.
Proverbs so often puts the locus of wisdom on what we say.
Our culture’s current and very understandable hangups about the injustice of forgiveness can be resolved by defining it as threefold:
- dismissal (of a wrong) as impetus to retaliation
- dismissal as impetus to resentment
- dismissal as impetus to alienation or reduction in standing
That list is not only a division, but also perhaps a progression: First, in very clear obedience to our Lord and to keep our communities and society from tearing themselves to shreds, we refuse to retaliate, despite our probably justifiable anger.
Second, and perhaps only as (a lot of) time passes but facilitated by both free ventilation and the wrongdoer’s repentance, we moderate our anger until it thoroughly dissipates. This part is an art, not a science: In the knowledge that we’re all quite capable of sin and likely blind to some of our own wrongdoing, we constantly tack toward total abatement of animosity and we refuse to cling to ill will; however, knowing that there are indeed things God hates, neither do we falsify anger’s cessation. As long it hangs around, we give it air when it’s time to give it air and let it motivate us to good deeds and systemic rectification.
Third, and properly only once the offender has confessed his or her sin, made amends, requested forgiveness, and otherwise shown ample evidence of complete repentance, we open the door to the end of ostracism, estrangement, and other relational sanctioning.
Technically, the second and third are interchangeable in order. Anger can and does linger even after witnessing repentance. But often, wrongdoers remain unrepentant, or at least inauthentically or unsatisfactorily repentant, which, while it renders the second form of forgiveness difficult, depending on the gravity of the offense renders the third form of forgiveness so hazardous to wrongdoer and injured alike that love requires it be withheld entirely. It is thus listed here last, even though, ideally, it’s something we should want, and deeply. If we love our enemies, how can we not?
God can and on some occasions does extend the last kind of forgiveness in the absence of amends because He is unassailable, rendering forgiveness less hazardous. But even He, for the sake of moral hazards to the sinner and the sinner’s neighbors, usually does not. We are to confess our sin against Him, point gratefully to the Cross as our amends, request forgiveness, and bear fruit in keeping with repentance, including making amends with our neighbors when our sin against God is coterminous with our sin against them.
I preached a meditation on hope in the New Testament to help the folks of University Baptist & Brethren Church ring in the first Sunday of Advent. (Here’s video evidence.)
There is a very fine line between abstruseness and nonsense. And neither writer nor reader can distinguish for sure.
If your hope for heaven holds that nothing you do here matters, then to hell with it.
Heaven is not a judgement-free zone.
Kitchen towels are much more effective at soaking up water if, instead of constantly moving them around, you let them rest. My attention is a kitchen towel.
I don’t feel at work the stress I feel at home, where stress accompanies not only the drive to get things done, but even the desire for recreation!
Why the difference? I’m not certain. But my surmises are several:
- For one, I’m explicitly working for other people. That relieves me of the kind of internal pressure I feel when I’m working on my own stuff.
- It also helps that those other people for whom I’m working are trustworthy and trust me. That means I basically have liberty to do as I please.
- I have liberty to do as I please as long as I color within the lines a distinct mission: To maximize the security, resilience, utility, and accessibility of DiamondBack’s information. That unity of purpose helps.
- Finally, five days a week I enjoy eight-hour expanses of time in which do the work.
- Oh, and I’ve largely managed to avoid working under deadlines.
Might I import those circumstances into my non-DiamondBack life? Yes. And in :
- I can view myself as explicitly working for God.
- God is trustworthy and trusts me to do as I please.
- The unity of purpose is easy to identify: The great commandments.
- As for time: Why so serious? What’s the rush? All of life is a gift.
From that last point, maybe the shorthand of it all is to feel that I get to do all the things: Whether I’ve actively decided to do something or that something is decided for me, it is all gratuity. Even adversity stimulates thought and the growth of wisdom and resilience. That’s how I feel at work. (How fortunate is that?) May I bring that feeling to bear in the rest of my life.
Here’s my latest working definition: “forgive”
“Hold fast to reproof, don’t let go. Keep it, for it is your life” (Proverbs 4:13, Alters). Lord, may I cherish correction.
So far, Potts’ Forgiveness: An Alternative Account seems beautiful…and spurious.
Name a movie in which there’s a disagreement between child and parents and the parents turn out to have been unequivocally right.
I’ll wait.
The difficulty in answering this question is representative of a major cultural problem. Filial piety is miles better than whatever it is we’re doing now (just-try-to-keep-the-kids-safe-and-happy-ism?), but it stands zero chance of ever working if it gets zero support from culture machines.
O, for hymnody that combines awe, piety, and moral effort.
Faith, hope, and love can all be misguided.
Hope is:
- an imagined, desired future that you feel could come to pass and which prompts you to act accordingly,
- the supposed bringer of that future, or
- the feeling that accompanies imagining that future
Fear is the undesired version of the same.