Coming in Clear.
PROVERBS 16:1-3
To humans belong the plans of the heart,
but from the Lord comes the proper answer of the tongue.
2 All a person’s ways seem pure to them,
but motives are weighed by the Lord.
3 Commit to the Lord whatever you do,
and he will establish your plans.
The first time I ever sent a text message, I was twenty, studying abroad, and standing on a cobbled street in St. Andrews, Scotland. It was drizzling, per usual and I was meeting up with friends at a pub/pizzeria (because everything is a pub/something). The text was along the lines of: “Where are you? Are we meeting on High Street or that place near the English quad? Someone text me back.” Emojis didn’t exist and I did not, and still won’t, use acronyms. Was I mad? Sad? Confused? Knowing me, standing in the rain in my wrinkled parka, probably all of the above. But you just can’t tell with a text and the nuances were lost on me back then.
They still are.
We all want our words and our actions to be interpreted correctly.
We want the meaning and the message to come through clearly like the old rabbit ear televisions that faded into color like a scene opening on stage. If we talk about a flat tire on the side of the road, we want everyone to picture the rutty jutting edge of the highway in the middle of nowhere and the kids screaming and laughing and banging on the windshield while the jack slips loosely in the gravel.
It’s the feeling of connection we seek above all else.
It’s why marriage and any other relationship is so difficult. In every conversation there is a lapse between the words spoken and the words received and in that span anything could happen.
When I set out to write Unbound, I wasn’t speaking to anyone but myself. I was making sense of the life God had given me by weaving it in with the lives of those ancestral matriarchs in the Bible. It was comforting, sitting in the chair-and-a-half in my living room while the house slept, to see how things played out to God’s perfection in hindsight.
And then, somehow, as I made peace with my own path, the words turned into a missive to all the other women out there wondering why and how they got where they are. That’s when it became THE BOOK. And then of course, as in texts and every conversation we have online and real life, I felt the weight of the meaning. I wanted the message to be heard clearly.
After weeks and months and deep breathing with my forehead to my knees and continual mottled prayers, I had to let it go. God knows my heart. He knows my message. It is up to Him to clear the soundwaves for it. It really is only “from the Lord” this “proper answer of the tongue.”
In “The Personal Heresy”, C.S. Lewis speaks of this disconnect between artist and meaning. He writes,
“Every work of art that lasts long in the world is continually taking on these new colours which the artist neither foresaw nor intended. We may, as scholars, detect and endeavor to exclude, them. We may, as critics, decide that such adventitious beauties are in a given case meretricious and trivial compared with those which the artist deliberately wrought. But all that is beside the purpose. Great or small, fortunate or unfortunate, they have been poetically enjoyed. And that is enough for my purpose.”
My prayer for all of us isn’t that our intentions come across clearly, because those can be flawed in so many ways. It is that God’s intentions do.
May we enunciate the Gospel through our lives in the most eloquent of ways.
Sunday Thoughts Link Up!
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A big thank you from Jamie on The Mom Gene!
