Give Me A Moment

Coming to know God (Father,Son, Holy Spirit) as the creator of all things, both visible and invisible, makes it a reasonable thing to imagine God as the maker of stories. Starting with this thought helps us to put the power and beauty of words and stories in their proper perspective. From this view, I would like to invite us to acknowledge words used to create stories and stories themselves, as the most effective tools for imparting transformational, transcendental, and spiritual knowledge.

As we launch into this journey through words and stories, let us consider God’s words in Isaiah 55: 8-11:

"For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways," says the Lord. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts. "For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven, and do not return there, but water the earth, and make it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; it shall not return to Me void, but it shall accomplish what I please, and it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it.

Here God shows that His word is perfectly effective. Helping us to recognize the fact that His flawless words are constantly busy, telling stories of faith, hope, love, salvation, redemption, and restoration with the ability to save souls. We, as people, can fall in love with this power and desire for our words to have the same innate transformational, transcendental, and spiritual effectiveness. We sometimes find ourselves flirting with the notion of seeking after forms of godliness but denying the Source of the power (2 Tim. 3:5). Consequently, we can get lost in this love of eloquence, losing sight of how God has given each of us a role to play in His stories that also carry a story of their own.

We all have a divine story but apart from God we as people attempt to derive power from the way the story is told. Appearing to deify the words chosen to tell stories while neglecting their immense capacity to build and destroy. Sometimes inadvertently and other times blatantly disconnecting power from truth as Proverbs 18: 21 tells us, “death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.”  To add to this magnitude, words can clarify, distort, and oversimplify what we feel our stories are meant to signify due to the cultural elements they carry with them. By not fully grasping the inherent value and potential of words, we tend to anticipate and abide in ready-made stereotypical narratives (Payne, 2006). Through this misunderstanding of the power of words, we limit ourselves to socially acceptable descriptions of every defining aspect of our life. Which can cause us to be inattentive to how the word of God authors all stories, leaving us to find our meaning and purpose negotiated among the words we use to try and fit our stories within a recognizable context. A context in which such things as characters, setting, plot, conflict, resolution, themes, morals, and symbolism can be readily identified and easily injected into another's story. Again, by not seeing God as the leading author of our stories we continue to grab at power through mortal attempts to inspire, empower, and encourage aspiring toward Ephesians 4: 29 which says “let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers.” Thereupon, we can see that in the right hands (hands that honor God as the sovereign Lord and Creator of all things), knowing and understanding the power of words and stories can evoke life-changing discoveries that open routes to new meanings and unexplored contexts.

From our human understanding, we can see how the concept of discovery provokes our imagination to illustrate understandings of what we have and have to experience. Providing mental pictures that capture the substance of what we believe to be the most valuable measures of a revolutionary story. The intoxicating quality of this substance causes us to chase moments like highs, hoping for euphoria through a manifesting of fantasies. In this never-ending pursuit, a hunger for relevance leads us on a hunt for posts in the social media jungle that enhance collections of social taxidermy. Providing opportunities for one to triumphantly acclaim how they managed to separate situations from context by trapping moments in alluring words. This thrill of discovery incites a taste for the sensational, a taste seen in the way moments are prepared with the finest inspiration, empowerment, and encouragement available to our human minds. Accordingly, discovery has the ability to turn us to God, as the author of words and meanings, leading to such truth as, “and they (believers in Jesus) overcame him (Satan) by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death,” that introduces and exposes us to unfamiliar experiences and unexplored contexts that speak to the soul" (Revelation 12: 11). 

Caught up in the hunt for moments, in the twilight of experience, we reveal to ourselves and others how discovery has altered us. We cannot nullify what our senses have consumed, or the operations of thoughts and ideas once they have entered our mind. We are forever changed by what we allow to touch our hearts and enter our stories. I pray this causes us to begin to reconsider our words and our stories in the sight of God. Learning to relinquish all sought after perceptions of power to God as our understanding matures. In closing, let us meditate on 2 Corinthians 10: 4-8:

For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled. Do you look at things according to the outward appearance? If anyone is convinced in himself that he is Christ's, let him again consider this in himself, that just as he is Christ's, even so we are Christ's. For even if I should boast somewhat more about our authority, which the Lord gave us for edification and not for your destruction, I shall not be ashamed.

  References

     Aven, T. (2015). Risk analysis. John Wiley & Sons.

Darnell Sheffield