Thursday, February 18, 2010

A Sign of the Times--Zeph 3: 9

"For then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the Lord, to serve him with one consent." (Zeph 3: 9)

When people in church meetings stop speaking in piles of cliches and start speaking and listening with care, with love both for the gift of language and for each other, the Second Coming will be close at hand, even at the door!

3 comments:

  1. Don't be too hard on cliches. Sometimes they can cover a spiritual understanding that is hard to express in other ways.

    I know that as my own testimony grew I probably said things that a million other people had said before. The difference was now I knew those things for myself. The spirit made the simple words extremely meaningful (at least to me) when I said them.

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  2. That's definitely true. Having done live translation for a lot of talks, though, I'm fairly convinced there are also times when they mean nothing.

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  3. There's an essay I like that talks about this:

    "The trouble with having the truth, in my experience, is that it can be easy to get numb to it. During my mission, for example, I would often lose focus when translating during meetings from German to English; it was so easy to simply repeat the kinds of phrases I’d heard in church thousands of times before that sometimes I’d forget to stop and think again about what they meant. This is also the problem with the standard lists of Sunday School answers: they are true, but hearing about them doesn’t always have the power to snap our minds out of cruise control."

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