Words

 I have been thinking about the importance of words for the past week or so.  Words matter.  They have always mattered, but they matter even more today than ever, I think.  In these fractious, complicated times, every word gets parsed and considered, and interactions are increasingly complex and nuanced.  As a word person, I think quite carefully when I speak most of the time, because it is important to me not to be misunderstood or to have my meaning misconstrued.  That has always mattered to me.  Today, it matters even more, when tempers are so on edge and people are so ready to be disagreeable.

When my kids were young, they would often have disagreements; with each other, with me, with their friends.  In working things out, they would tell me that they were misunderstood or that they didn't mean something how it was taken.  I used to tell them that good intentions are important, of course, and hopefully the other person will assume that of you if they know and love you.  But the most important driver in that situation of disagreement is not your intention, unfortunately, but the other person's perception.  You can have the best intentions in the world, but if the person on the receiving end perceives it more negatively, if it hits differently than you intended, then it doesn't matter what you actually intended, it will have a negative outcome.

Understanding intention versus impact/perception is one of the most important life skills a person can develop.  And it goes along with the next step, word framing.

How you frame what you say has everything to do with intention and impact.  I will give an easy example with three different types of apologies.

1. I'm sorry if you felt hurt.
2. I'm sorry.
3. I'm sorry for saying XXX and I understand that I hurt you by saying XXXXXXX.

All three of those statements start with the same two words - I'm sorry.  But they are entirely different statements, which have entirely different intentions and will land with entirely different impacts and result in completely different perceptions.

I'm sorry if... is never an apology, because you are not apologizing at all, you are actually pushing the responsibility for feeling something onto the other person.  We all know this.  It is obvious, and the game is clear to all parties.

I'm sorry, with no further acknowlegement of what you are actually sorry for, is a flat statement without taking accountability, sort of a vague acknowledgement that something happened.  Unless it is a very small matter (spilling the salt or bumping into someone) it is a passive way of kinda sorta saying something without actually owning it, i.e., gee, that's too bad.  Plausible deniability is top of my mind, when I hear this type of half in, half out type of apology, because there is no actual explicit wrong doing for which you are actually taking responsibility.  As far as anyone knows, you could be apologizing for anything, or nothing at all.  It leaves an unsatisfactory feeling, and the impact is usually quite negative, even though, technically, an apology was made.

The third statement is the one that will allow for conversation, growth and reconciliation, because it owns the reality of the impact and the perception of the other person, regardless of your intention.  It allows forward movement, because you own the wrong, you can talk about it, the awkwardness is thus removed, and you can process and rectify together.  You connect as human beings, and you work through the problem in unity.

This, I think, is what is so often missing in today's angry culture.  We hide behind the computer screen, typing out harsh words in anonymity without seeming to realize that real people are on the other side of that dark abyss, without caring that the impact of what we are saying can result in a perception that we will never be able to recover from in real life.

We will not always live in this time.  Five years from now, ten years from now, the world will be different.  We will see things from another perspective because it is inevitable.  Time moves on relentlessly, and things change.  We will gather more information, and things will clarify.  We don't know what things will look like, but we know for sure the world will look different than it does now because the world is not static.  And the words we have uttered in frustration or anger or even with hatred now may very well come back to haunt us later, because the internet, as we all know, is forever.  And what seems so clear now may not be as obvious in ten years with the benefit of hindsight.  I very much fear what the future holds for a lot of fractured families in the years to come for this very reason.  I don't think family estrangement is going away any time soon.

So, circling back to the meaning of words.  When we say we are Christians, we need to remember that we are not being filtered just through the lens of those who already love Christ, and who are inclined to think the best of us.  We are also being judged by those who do not, and are not.  What do they see?  What kind of words do they hear?  Are they observing the Pharisee or the rebel Rabbi?  Whose way do they observe you following?  Is your life an invitation or a discouragement to following Jesus?  Whatever your intent may be, what is the impact of your words on the people who hear them?  And what is their perception of Christianity from listening to you and observing your life?

1. Are you saying one thing while meaning another, like a disingeuous non-apology?
2. Are you ambiguously Christian, worshing in church on Sunday, but worshiping the world the rest of the week?
3. Are you living the Gospel of Jesus Christ, exemplifying the love of the Beatitudes, spreading the joy found in the Fruit of the Spirit, connecting with people, sharing with people, being open to people, accepting the people that Jesus loved and accepted.  (Reminder: the lame, the poor, women, the disenfranched, he and his parents were refugees, tax collectors, widows, the bllind, lepers, etc, etc.)

In Matthew 12, Jesus spends a lot of time verbally jousing with the Pharisees, who made it their life's work to try to snare him with any reasonable excuse to arrest and execute him.  He was a serious threat to the power structure of their ordered life under the Roman rule, in which they sat atop their internal hierarchy, and they wanted him gone before he came to the attention of the Roman government, which could swoop in and dismantle it.  But Jesus understood that their concerns were not for the spiritual (or even physical) well being of the people they were supposed to be leading, but rather, for their own power and prestige.  Again and again he revealed their true motivations, pulling back the curtain on their greed and licentiousness and calling them out on it.  In versus 34-37, he blasts them with their ultimate fate:

You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good?  For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.  A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him.  But I tell yo that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgement for every empty word they have spoken.  For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.

I believe those words hold as true today as they did for the Pharisees.  The mouth cannot help but reveal what is held in the heart.  If you harbor evil, you will reveal it through your words.  And by your words you will either be acquitted or condemned by the one judge from whom you cannot hide.