Communication errors abound, but not welcome

By Cindi Shroyer

So this guy takes his dog to the vet. Seems the dog’s eyes are crossed and the pet owner wants to see if some­thing can be done.

For the exam­i­na­tion, the vet picks the dog up and takes a look. After a few moments the vet speaks.

“Well,” the vet sighs, “I’m gonna have to put him down.”

“What!” the owner exclaims. “Just because he has crossed eyes?”

“No,” the vet says. “Because he’s heavy.”

We have all been there — what we mean may be what we said but not what we meant.

There is even a famous say­ing by Robert McClosky that graces t-shirts, cof­fee mugs and edi­to­r­ial page quote sec­tions about it.

“I know that you believe you under­stand what you think I said, but I am not sure you real­ize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

Got that?

Wow. Leaves a lot of room for error, doesn’t it? I find this most frus­trat­ing in this age of elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion. You send an e-mail and the per­son you sent it to gets their under­gar­ments in a bunch because they attrib­uted a dif­fer­ent tenor to the mis­sive than you intended. “Have a nice day” trans­lates to some­thing like Dirty Harry telling you to “make my day.” You never meant it that way. You really were hop­ing the recip­i­ent would have a nice day. Now nei­ther of you will.

Then you get the folks who type in all cap­i­tal let­ters. For those who are not yet savvy, that becomes yelling in non-verbal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Here you just like cap­i­tal let­ters and/or hit the cap lock by acci­dent and decided a lit­tle whimsy was okay and the next thing you know you are accused of scream­ing the news of the arrival of lit­tle Edmond or the death of aunt Har­riet or the grad­u­a­tion of L’monjello and Oran­jello, the twins no one expected to get out of prison and still be able to walk the stage.

True, cap­i­tal let­ters do add empha­sis. We just have to be care­ful what we emphasize.

We also have to be care­ful of what we say, how we say it, our method of communication.

There is no room for error when we are talk­ing about God’s Word and the truth of His gift of salvation.

There is an ever-growing num­ber of peo­ple who would have us set aside the Bible (like enough of us haven’t rel­e­gated it to dust-collector sta­tus as it is). They are preach­ing a gospel of empty minds and empty rit­ual they pretty much guar­an­tee will get us, well, they can’t even tell us where. That trans­lates to, well, to hell.

I am going to step on some toes here. Just thought I would warn you.

Light­ing can­dles in place of wor­ship is not okay.

Chant­ing a phrase or word instead of wor­ship and Bible study is not okay.

Walk­ing around a labyrinth pre­tend­ing to pray when you are really try­ing to stay in the path’s pat­tern is not going to suffice.

If you think this stuff is good replace­ment for wor­ship and Bible study, I chal­lenge you to find a pas­sage in the Bible (66 books, no more, no less) where it says it is okay and bring it to my atten­tion. I will eat my words along with this newspaper.

Go back to what Jesus did when He walked with us. I don’t read a sin­gle pas­sage where He went home to med­i­tate and needed can­dles and zither music to get the job done. I don’t read any­where that He walked around in a series of cir­cles and taught His dis­ci­ples to pray.

He taught them to pray by head­ing out by Him­self to talk to His Father (talk means more like a con­ver­sa­tion, not an emp­ty­ing out of one’s mind. Gotta keep some thoughts in there to keep the con­ver­sa­tion going, ya’ know.). He mod­eled a prayer for them, iron­i­cally enough using words that can­not be minced. They can­not be mis­con­strued. We know who we are talk­ing to, what He wants, what we want, what we need and how those needs are sup­plied. He also prayed right where they were — on the road to the next town or in a town where they were ministering.

The times Jesus said a phrase more than once was to get a point across (feed my sheep) or when He was cry­ing out to His Father as He was dying.

I can hear you by the way (I have a very good imag­i­na­tion). I can hear the grunts and groan­ings of peo­ple who read this and are being offended. I can hear the paper being waded up and tossed across the room or in the trash can. Let me put it this way — if you are angry and offended (a very bad thing), I sug­gest you do some soul search­ing and Bible study. If you are conscious-touched offended, well, you prob­a­bly bet­ter do the same (and this cri­sis of con­scious is a very good thing). As a good friend of mine reminds me often — remem­ber we take offense, pick it up, carry it around. It is not thrust upon us, wrapped in cool paper and given as a gift. We take offense. And that means we can put it right back down or refuse delivery.

This mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion about God and how to wor­ship comes because peo­ple (we human sheep) are con­tin­u­ally in search of the easy way to get things done. And while des­per­ately seek­ing the easy way out we bypass or over­look the real way to get things done. We lose valu­able time; we get con­fused by all the easy-way-out sell­ers (they would be false teach­ers, and I think those are men­tioned some­where in the Bible. Hmm. Maybe 2 Peter 2:1). With their help, and some­times with­out it, we get lost.

We are told the Bible is too hard to under­stand; the lan­guage too archaic. But it isn’t if we pray (you know, real words strung together in a sen­tence or two) and ask God to reveal to us what we need to see. There is meat there, plated and ready to be served. We just have to pick up the fork and knife and dig in.

Some parts are tough, some ten­der, some raw and bloody. All are sea­soned per­fectly for our con­sump­tion. Con­fu­sion is not one of the sea­son­ings. Instead it is sea­soned with truth, inerrancy, love, hon­esty, power, con­fronta­tion. All the sea­son­ings are healthy and beneficial.

It is God’s Word. Sim­ple. True. It needs no help from us. It can be under­stood by us. It’s under­stand­abil­ity is not hinged on the lan­guage of the day.

“For God so loved the world that He sent He only begot­ten Son, that whoso­ever believeth on Him will have ever­last­ing life.”

Through gen­er­a­tions those words may become more mod­ern, but the mes­sage remains the same. It is time­less. It is unchang­ing. It is a promise. It can­not be con­fused with another mes­sage. It says what it means and means what it says.

Christ fol­low­ers should be the same. Pas­tors and teach­ers should do the same. Share the sim­ple, unchang­ing, not-to-be-confused-with-any-other mes­sage that Christ died once for all.

Posted by Guest 2 Columnist on Jul 18 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.