Skip to main content

Full of Grace....or something else?


Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone. (Colossians 4:6)          
            I'm writing this with the plan to post it on a day when my conversation may not be full of anything like grace. It's partly a response to our political season, and partly a response to the vocally prevalent forces in our society. I started noticing the force I'm talking about when I was in high school. It wasn't new then, but since that time, I think it's become more entrenched in our society. One of my coworkers and I had been having a verbal slam fest, "all in fun." Later, I found myself wondering why it was that I couldn't think of any way to be funny that built someone up. 
          I noticed it on TV, too. Sit coms all seemed to involve putting someone down, putting someone "in their place," showing someone up, showing how stupid, backward, bad someone was. In other words, "funny" meant ridicule and abuse. In a political season, or among activists, "Funny" and "amusing" tends to mean agenda-driven propaganda.
          If our conversation is always full of grace, there is no room in it for anything else, ever. There is especially no room in which to amuse ourselves at the expense of another, even our enemies.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In the sky:
New Moon
Eta Aquarid Meteor Shower (big one)
Birthday of
Sigmund Freud
Robert Edwin Perry

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The List

              Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,   through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance;   perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5)           Think about it. We have been justified. At least, we could be justified if we stopped insisting that our justification be based on our merits. We have peace with God, or could have peace if we stopped throwing temper tantrums. We have gained access into grace i...

Meditations of the Heart

  May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. (Psalm19:14)           As I started writing this post, I noted that the meditations of my heart are all over the mental landscape, from a hub where eight superhighways come together to a lunar or nuclear landscape. Do you see my error? The moment I read the word meditation , I think about thoughts. But what’s described here is the meditations of our hearts ; our wills.           While the meditations of our minds may be all over the place, the meditations of our wills tend to be a little more stable by the time we are adults. We no longer tend to want to pursue the ten separate careers we did in any given day as children. Part of this is humble acceptance of reality. We come to understand that we can’t do it all. I think another part of it is disappointmen...

Listen To Him

              The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your fellow Israelites. You must listen to him . (Deuteronomy 18:15)           Today, we switch from Jesus’ claims of “I am” to prophecies made about Him. My Bible platform is starting in Deuteronomy. I’d start in Genesis, where we would learn that the one who would save us would be a descendant of Eve (Genesis 3:15), of Noah (by default), Abram and Sara(Genesis 12:1-3). Isaac (Genesis 17:19), Jacob (Genesis 25:23), Judah (Genesis 29:8), and David (II Samuel 7:12-16). There were also references to a new covenant (Jer. 31:31-34; Ezek. 36:22-32). In addition, there were prophecies about when and where the prophet/Messiah would be born and what would happen to him.           Of course, naysayers will claim that Jesus’ life was retrofitted or reverse enginee...