Our world seems to be suffering from a communication breakdown. It permeates every facet of life from the personal level to the global. This communication breakdown can be traced back thousands of years to a unique incident. It was a wonderful time; a veritable utopia wherein all people spoke the same language and managed to work together toward a common goal. It would have been a perfect society except that their common goal was the obsoletion of God and the deification of man. Seriously though, it wouldn't have ended well. So God stepped in.
He recognized that if we were left to our own devices we could accomplish anything. Sounds great, right? I mean, that's what we keep telling our kids. The problem that God recognized was that the "anything" that we would choose to accomplish would have been horribly wrong and ultimately very bad for all parties involved.
So what does God do? Of course, he scrambles our communication systems. We know that God suddenly caused people to speak in different languages so that no one would understand anyone else. It would all sound like senseless babble. Kind of like when you listen to a talkative baby, or watch anime in the original language (I don't get it guys! The English dub might be a little over the top, but it's usually just as good, and you don't miss anything in the captions when you step away to grab your popcorn out of the microwave. Can't we all just get along?). Everyone was confused, and all production was ceased. People began spreading out (as God had told them to in the first place). It was probably not the solution I would have come up with, but I must say it was an effective strategy. Well played, God. Well played.
But I'm beginning to wonder, what if a change in languages wasn't the only thing that God did to human kind that day? What if God scrambled our entire communication system. Because communication is so much more than just speaking words in a known language and hearing words in a known language. There are senders, receivers, filters, encoding, decoding, and probably some steps that I'm forgetting right this moment. Even if God had left us all with the same language, but messed with just our encoding and decoding systems, we would be able to get...well, kind of where we are today.
Every day we produce statements that make perfect sense to us. Yet the people we are talking to seem to get the entire idea backwards or off in left field.
Part of the issue is that we sometimes use words with an intended meaning that is not inherent in the words themselves. Example: I know a guy whom I will refer to as "Reginald". When I am talking with Regy and he is explaining something to me he will periodically ask the question, "do you know what I mean?" For years I would answer based on my perceived understanding of what he was trying to communicate. If I thought I understood his intent, I would say "yes". If I was confused, I would say "no". It wasn't until more recently that I discovered the true meaning behind Regy's question. He wasn't really asking whether or not I understood what he meant. What he was actually asking was whether or not I agreed with his line of thinking. So now when I talk with Reginald and he asks, "do you know what I mean?" I will answer with a more clear, "yes, I know what you mean, but I don't/and I do agree with you."
These kinds of miscommunications have been damaging marriages for centuries (probably millennia). They are so common--especially when the encoding and decoding takes place across the gender filter--that comedians have been banking on these misunderstandings for quite some time. It's a regular Amelia Bedelia circus. What's even better is that we know we have this problem--we can even laugh about it if we have a healthy perspective on life--yet we still manage to get so incredibly frustrated when we find ourselves in those very same situations. I've been there. Some times I will even have enough presence of mind to realize that I am not actually communicating my message, but I still won't be able to find the right words to make my point. We can try, and try, and try again, and it still might not click all the way through to the other person.
What if that is part of what God did on that infamous day at the Tower of Babel? As if to say, "I'm going to make them all talk in different languages, but just in case they try to come back around to a more unified means of communication I will also jumble their sense of meaning as well...for good measure. That should keep them in line for a while." Boy howdy, did it ever! If there was ever any concern that we might all actually work agreeably together, it was taken care of right there and then. We've been at each others' throats ever since.
Just imagine with me for a moment if our tongues were graced with all the fruit of the spirit. What if every word from our mouths (which Jesus tells us is simply the overflow of the heart; in other words, the spiritual condition of our heart shapes our speech) was produced from a spirit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? What would happen if we allowed the Holy Spirit to encode our words? Rather than getting frustrated with others when they don't understand us, what if instead we recognized our own short-comings in understanding others, and showed grace and love to those around us?
There is no guarantee that all communication would become perfect because there is still a matter of the receiver requiring the Holy Spirit to decode the message. We can only do our part; we cannot dictate the actions and understandings of others. But we can show grace.
Lord, how can I use my words this week to show and share your love and grace to others?
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