American English – A Living Language

My beloved grand children learn the meaning of words.  Americans love to change the meaning of perfectly good words!  bad can mean really good!  Wow can one be fooled by words! 

Ambiguous

“Ambiguous” is a wonderful word – learn it’s meaning!  Every human being longs and yearns for hope.  In my life time change has accelerated and in your generation you will experience a never ending series of events in your life far beyond my wildest dreams.

I pray you will learn the lessons of my day and study the lessons of the past.  “Hope and Change” are powerful emotional words, but know they never ever stand alone.  They are words that serve to support a full body.  But when they stand alone they are only a bare skeleton without spirit, flesh and muscle.  Alone they symbolize and have the essence of a pagan idol of old.  They possess no life or spirit and lack power to love or heal or create. 

Standing alone they are ambiguous and provide only a coat rack to hang something on and nothing more.  They are words that demand a further description of the body, flesh and the spirit that they will inhabit.

Barack Obama captured the imagination of a nation.  He spoke words of hope and promises of being able to negotiate a peace between warring divisions.  They would address the current polarization between the extremes of the left and the right and would bring calm to the storm clouds gathering overhead.  He promised a new era with hope and change we could believe in.

Because these words trigger the powerful emotional nature of humans, the potential is every person hears what they want to hear while the speaker does not reveal the full truth hidden in the messengers heart!

Yet when one listens with their spirit, the spirit if truth will begin to manifest itself in the gut.  Learn to listen to your gut – it calls the spirit to seek the truth!  It was my gut that could see through the disarming smile and deep longing to heal the divisional madness that had penetrated our nation.  It was the gut that first detected something was missing and I could not shake it.

The questioning began in earnest after the South Carolina primary.  Who is this Barack Obama and what does he stand for?  What are the meaning of his words?  Why does he have to use a prompter for every speech?  Why is he unable to risk speaking from the heart?  Are his speeches being so carefully crafted, he is unable to express his own words and ideas from the heart or off the cuff?   What is the truth that lies hidden in Barack Obama?  Who is he?  What does he really believe in? 

The truth will set us free – who said that?  The gut instincts that came form the teaching of my mother and father and my church and they were bugging me.  Who are you playing or going out with?  Who are their parents and what at do their parents believe in?  It’s as if my parents were sedning me messages from heavens gates.  Open your eys son, seek the truth and check things out.

Barack Obama engaged my spiritual hope, but I was unable to discern what kind of hopes he had versus those I knew I wanted.  He had developed an ability to reflect what I wanted to hear without reveling what  his true meaning was!  Charismatic Ambiguity was his method and message.  Somewhere from down in gut arose a warning that engages the spirit into a struggle to detect and discern the truth.  The spirits task is to cut through the smoke, ambiguity and pere into the heart of the messenger.

In the study of homiletics and preaching I was taught one can not separate the message from the messenger.  If the message is not the truth that lives in the heart of the messenger the hearer in the audience will eventually begin to detect the truthfulness buried in the words of the messenger.

To be continued …..