Heart Language

It does not matter how fluent I am in Spanish, there always seems to be a point at which the words coming out of my mouth feel inadequate to describe what is happening in my heart.  When I hit that linguistic wall, I know I need to revert to speaking my heart language.  There are some things that are just better expressed in your native tongue.  For me, the top two situations that require English are Praying and Expressing Love.

Probably because both love and prayer come from the deepest part of my heart, I have a hard time breaking my thoughts down into verb tenses and indirect object pronouns.  Finding the right words is hard work, not the work of the “moment”.  My mind refuses to violate my emotions by forcing them into an unnatural form, twisting and tangling the strings of the heart until they no longer play a pure tune.  It’s like contaminating the deep well of sweet caring with the sweat of labor.  Some things just need to be expressed in my heart language.

For some time now, I have had a desire to tell our best Costa Rican friends just how I feel about them.  I want them to know just how much their friendship has meant to me.  I want them to understand how special I think it is that they would take a risk and get close to a foreigner… especially knowing that we are missionaries who come and go every few years.  It is a lot of work to be friends with someone who struggles to communicate in your language.  I wonder if I would have the courage to be that kind of friend if the shoe were on the other foot.

I want to tell my friends that I love them so dearly, but I just can’t find the right words in Spanish.  I want them to know that I see the risk they took, I appreciate the work it takes, and I am so very thankful for their patient love.  Our friends have opened their lives and their homes and their hearts to us.  They have shared their food and their family.  They have given us more than they will ever know.  They have, in many ways, gone against their own cultural current and opened doors for us that we could have never opened on our own.  Their sacrifice does not escape me.

For a long, long time now, my friends have been silently precious to me.  When I am with them, my heart pulses telepathically.  I love you dear friend!  I love you!  I don’t know how, but I think they can hear my heart beat.  I think they know that my heart is open to them.  They can sense it, though I can’t express it.  I love you with my heart language when my second language doesn’t feel like enough.  And I look forward to the day we meet again in Heaven and we both will speak and understand the language of the heart.

 

All we like wifi have gone astray…

You know, the Bible was written by men from the East who lived in an agricultural society.  (Now, it IS inspired by God and he does open our hearts and minds to understand it better.)  But because it’s an Eastern book, there are a lot of illustrations and phrases and word pictures that go right over my head.  I’ve had to LEARN how to understand the message.

For example, I’ve never worked in a vineyard.  So when Jesus says the Kingdom of Heaven is like a vine with a foreign species grafted in, I have to go learn something about grafting a vine to understand that the Gentiles were the foreign species and the Israelites were there original vine.  Basically you make a cut in both vines, join them together and wrap it up.  Then as the vine heals, it becomes one and the new branch is a part of the main vine.  I had to learn that to understand this illustration, but the original hearers would have captured the word picture right away.

Another common Biblical illustration that goes over my head is when Jesus talks about sheep.  I imagine that he is sitting on a hillside with a group of eager listeners around him.  He looks down the slope and sees a herd of sheep, hears them bleating and chewing, maybe sees the shepherd sitting on a rock a little distance from the group.  And he says, “Look over there, all people are like sheep who constantly wander off if someone isn’t taking care of them.”

“Ahhhh!  We know what that’s like!” Everyone smiles and nods, some nudge their neighbor, “That same thing happened to your sheep last week!”

And here’s me, the modern reader in a Western country who has only seen sheep in a pen at the State Fair, “Oh, do sheep wander off a lot?”  Maybe if the Bible would have been written in my context the illustration would have sounded like this:

All people are as committed as a lousy wifi connection in a third world country.

Then I would have chuckled and nodded, “Yep, I gotcha.  Fifty percent of the time it’s slow and the other 50% it’s just not connecting.”  I get it, we’re sporadic and unfocused.  That’s the kind of illustration that would capture my attention.

So when people say you must STUDY the Bible, part of what you must study is how things used to be done. (Want to learn more about sheep behaviors?  click here) History and archaeology will help.  A little knowledge of Middle Eastern customs and culture will help.  And the Holy Spirit will help too.  Ask God to help you understand what you are reading.  Without his illumination, you will feel like I do sometimes.  You’ll feel like you’re missing something that made sense to the original audience.

Ask God to help you understand, and he will.

“All we, like sheep, have gone astray.  Each of us has turned to our own way…” Isaiah 53:6a

The Carte Blanche of Word Play

It’s true that political correctness is the new religion.  But have you noticed that we’ve invented a few clever linguistic acrobatics to say what we mean and still twist around the risk of directly offending someone?  For example, here in Costa Rica you can begin any insult with the phrase “con todo respeto” (basically meaning “with all due respect”).  With this carte blanche you can speak your mind freely and no one can accuse you of intending to insult someone… even if you really did intend to insult them.

In the South of the United States they use the phrase, “bless his heart” to soften the blow.  One might hear sentences like, “He’s just an idiot, bless his heart.” Yet no one can accuse the speaker of mal intent, unless you really have something against Paula Dean.  Bless her heart.

In other circles, one can add the phrase “just saying” and then just say anything you want.  Other politically correct, carte blanche phrases include “in my humble opinion” or “Support the Troops” or “God Bless America” or whatever political catchphrase is the mode of the day.  Unless you are of the moral elite who “refuse to cut your conscience to fit the latest fashion,” these phrases are super handy to whip out anytime you need a shield.  Because, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion” is the modern day equivalent of “Thou shalt not murder” we have exchanged the principle of Let Freedom Reign for the motto Don’t Tread on Me.