Ga…ih…ouah
Cal Aaron's young granddaughter came to the kitchen
while Cal was eating liver. Amber looked only for a moment and then
said, "Is that good?" Cal, chompin' away said, "It's great? Wanna try
it?" She did. He put a forkful in her mouth and immediately she leaned
over and without allowing her tongue or lips to touch it any more than
already, she appealed, garbled but clear enough and decisively enough,
"Get it out!" "Ga…ih…ouah." Enunciation had to fend for itself.
I like a person who knows his/her own mind and I like
them even better when they make their feelings crystal clear even if we
might have some question about the precision with which they said it.
If we're delivering one…more…time a moral exhortation to
pursue this virtue or that ["We need honesty…We need to be kind…We need
to be courageous" and "here are nine ways you can develop this virtue"]
then I suppose we won't have much trouble making ourselves clear; the
congregation could finish the lesson for us if we had a stroke.
But if we're attempting to bring out the richness of the
Story in new ways, so that the people of God will know their God better
and know their place in the unfolding of that Story we might have to
work with unfamiliar truths. We don't have to be dull when we're doing
that but we ought to work at making ourselves clear. There's a price we
have to pay if we're to be able to do that—we have to get to know what
we're talking about and that means work with the biblical witness.
In my life I've spluttered on and on enough, going
nowhere in particular and sometimes I've claimed, "I have it in my head,
I just don't know how to say it." I suppose that might have been
the case once in a blue moon, but as I reflect now on my little life I
realise that my speech was woolly because my thinking was woolly. The
problem didn't lie in my inability to communicate well what I had a real
grasp on—it was that I didn't really have a grasp on it before I got up
to bob and weave.
Pay the price!