SMALL BRAIN ON BIG WORDS

Yeah… I’m not much of a big word guy.

Every once in a while my wife will say something to me and I’ll have to go look it up to see what the proper response should be. I pause to look up words sometimes when reading an e-mail, cuz I have no idea what someone just said. Some people like to shorten several small words by dumping in one big word that means essentially the same thing. Which makes them sound really smart. You’d think with a Bachelors degree from UC Davis and a grip of seminary classes in pursuit of my M.DIV- I’d have a better handle on the big words, but nope. I’m dumb.

So, last night in church, Ed used the word “despondent”. Yeah. Because of context I knew it was bad, but essentially I had no idea what it really meant. He kept saying it, even threw out “despondency” and then he even had it in the printed outlines as a subtitle for a section of Elijah’s life.

This left me feeling dumb again…. so I searched my trusty iphone dictionary app while sitting in church and here’s what I discovered. That cool word means, “feeling downcast and disheartened and hopeless.” “Oh”, I thought, “Like how I feel when everyone acts like they understand the big words and I’m scratching my head like an idiot.”

Also last week, in my Greek class, our prof kept using the word “declension”. Which he then told us is a “pattern”- to which one of my brave peers asked, “why not just call it a pattern”. I laughed out loud. Classic. Those were my thoughts precisely!

Now what is to follow, will surely be shocking to you because the next series we are starting in Encounter in 2 weeks is called “BIG WORD THEOLOGY” and yes, it’s about BIG words. BIG BIG BIG WORDS…. mostly cuz the have crazy BIG implications for us, but they are also big and letter filled.

So, wish me luck. I’m gonna have to double my study time this next month or something. We’re gonna look at 4 BIG THEOLOGY WORDS (or groups of words in some cases) and talk about what their implications are for our lives.

WEEK 1: The Omni-God: Omnipresent, Omniscient, Omnipotent.
WEEK 2: Anthropomorphism: expanding our view of God. (HA! That’s a mouthful.)
WEEK 3: Sanctification: being and becoming holy.
WEEK 4: Hypostatic Union and the Trinity: thinking and rethinking the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit thing.

There you go. If you just read that and didn’t have to look any of it up… you should teach seminary or something cuz mine really really loves Big words.

Anyway, there’s really ZERO possibility of doing any real justice to any of them in a 35 minute talk, but hopefully I’ll get some students walking out the door with the assumptions turned on their ear and with an increased desire to study more on what it means for their daily lives and their connection with God.

I think I’ll just preach to myself this whole series and hope someone else is like me 🙂