This morning I posted the following rambling set of thoughts as a discussion starter for my on-line class ("Making it all the way to Christmas with your faith intact"). "I'm thinking out loud here," I wrote. "Read these thoughts, and see where they lead you today."Consider the idea that the word "love" never fulfilled it's latent potential on earth until Christ was born 2,000 years ago...
... We respond to words much of the time as if they were absolute, that the definition of a word is somehow immutable, standing independent as it were from life. But what if words were/are containers into which we could pour added meaning.
...What if, for example, we could amplify the meaning of the word "Hope" by living lives of such promise that the people we live and work and play around understood it in a new way? Or what if we took the word "Grace" out of the comparative abstraction of the famous song (admittedly a great song) and presented it to our neighbors as a living, breathing reality via the way we respond to the world around us...?
... What if the concept of "Love" was not yet fully animated before Christ came to earth? What if the word still means something only two dimensional for those who do not know Christ? What if we did some thinking about how the Christ-love might redefine our relationships once we really begin to understand the meaning of "Love that came down at Christmas..." "Love was born at Christmas...."
... Think about the life - the living theology - we can bring (you and I) to the vocabulary of Grace once we fully engage Christmas. How complete is your/my vocabulary? Do we need to learn the deeper meaning of these words... Hope - Promise - Peace - Love - Grace - Joy...?
... Make a journal entry if you wish - record your thoughts. Talk with God about it. I know I will.
Love and blessings - DEREK
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