by Roseanna White | Jul 23, 2020 | Thoughtful Thursdays
“How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!”
~ Psalm 133:1 (NIV)
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say they wish for unity among God’s people. But as my husband pointed out, what they usually mean is “I wish everyone agreed with me, because clearly I’m right.”
But when we really stop to consider unity and what it takes to achieve it, something begins to be clear. Unity does not and cannot ever begin with someone else changing their stance. Unity begins with ME. And it begins with me humbling myself. I can never make anyone agree with me. But what I can do is reach out to them, try to understand them, try to see where I may be wrong or clinging too tightly to my own ideals, and love them.
Unity doesn’t mean agreement. It means being in harmony, in accord. But harmony requires more than one note. We can be one in Christ and still have different opinions, feel different ways about things, understand things in different ways. God created the Church to be a BODY, not a stack of photocopies. So how do we actually do that?
How do we grant those other opinions, interpretations, and feelings as legitimate–be in harmony with them–even if we don’t agree?
“I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3 eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. 7 But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift.
(Eph 4:2-7, ESV)
I had lots of thoughts on those early verses of this passage and actually shared them in the #BeBetter Community. I’ll likely go into them more here at some point too, but today, let’s just look at verse 3. Eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. This is a continuation of the list that describes HOW we can walk worthy of our calling. And I think it sums it up so very well.
If we revisit our definition of what unity really means within the Church, then we could reword it like this: Eager to be in harmony with our brothers and sisters rather than being right.
I know something I absolutely love, whether singing or playing an instrument, is joining someone else not in the melody, but in harmony. Harmony does this thing to me (let’s hope it’s not just me, LOL)–it almost vibrates in my veins. It fills me up. It takes the pleasure of one note and doesn’t just add another, it multiplies. (I’ve studied music philosophy enough to know there’s actually some math and physics behind this, with resonance and…well, I won’t get into it, but it’s a real thing, LOL.)
THIS is what unity within the Church should do to us. It should make us resonate, thrill, vibrate with His Spirit. It should not just add another voice, it should multiply His love. It should make us willingly seek bonds–chains, things that tie us to each other–of peace.
Are we that eager for unity? For peace with other Christians?
I confess I haven’t always been–they were words I said, but I didn’t give a whole lot of thought to how to actually live them. Recently, though, there’s been a real quickening in my spirit about this. Let’s seek some harmony today. When you hear a fellow believer saying something—maybe something unpopular or daring or risky, maybe something that doesn’t at first rub you the right way—find a way to join your voice to theirs not in contradiction, not in a simple agreement, but in harmony. Add something new to the conversation that makes a resonance.
by Roseanna White | Jul 20, 2020 | Word of the Week
A couple weeks ago a friend sent me a list of “18 English Words That Are Actually Hindi,” and while quite a few of them I knew that about, others really surprised me.
One of those was cushy. I knew that cushy meant “soft” and so I think I always imagined it came from cushion. Cuz, you know…logical, right?
Wrong. Cushy comes directly from the Hindi khush, meaning “pleasant, happy, healthy.” That morphed into “easy” or “soft” by the early 1900s.
Cushion, on the other hand, comes from the Latin via French and has been around since the 1300s. So the fact that these two words sound very similar is largely a coincidence, but also probably has something to do with why the “soft, easy” meaning of cushy really caught on.
by Roseanna White | Jul 16, 2020 | Thoughtful Thursdays
One of the reasons I’ve always loved fiction is that it can take mere facts and make them mean something to us. More, they can take a familiar story and show us a side of it we’ve never considered. Stories can take the truth and shine the Truth upon it. They can help us see beyond OUR truth to HIS Truth.
It’s a curious thing though, isn’t it? For anyone who believes in absolute Truth, the idea of truth-with-a-little-t can be odd. If something’s true, factual, actual…then doesn’t that mean it’s True?
No. And here’s why.
The same facts can tell many stories. One story may seem true to you–absolutely, beyond reproach, undeniably TRUE. But to me, it will ring false. Because to me, some other story seems truer.
Seems. Feels. Appears. These are not words that belong to God’s truth, right? So how do we separate them from ours?
This is a theme I explore quite a bit in A Portrait of Loyalty. My heroine is a photographer who spends her days altering and creating photographs for the war effort–falsified photos meant to leak false information, protect agents in the field, and help the Admiralty tell a story. Sometimes that story is true, and sometimes it’s just necessary. But always it has its basis is facts. She takes pieces of this truth, pieces of that truth, and creates a story with them in a new photo.
At a key point in the story, when the Admiral is presented with facts that would paint someone in a terrible light, she reminds him of this: “Remember that the same facts can tell multiple stories. You’ve taught me that.”
We can use the same information, the same true things, to draw very different conclusions.
This is in some ways simply part of humanity. But it’s also a part we need to remain always aware of, if we want to guard against it in ourselves and in matters of spiritual urgency. If we want to #BeBetter, we need to remember that there really is THEIR truth, there is OUR truth…but even more, there is His Truth. And it is neither theirs nor ours, most likely. It is something different. It is something higher, better. More filled with love.
It’s hard for us as mere humans to separate our own story, our own perspective, from what is True. Experiences make us feel a certain way. And that feeling is more true to us than logical arguments people present. But here’s what I’ve come to realize:
Just because we legitimately feel something, doesn’t mean that the feeling is legitimate. It doesn’t mean we should feel that. Morever, we do not have to be ruled by it. Feelings should never be granted the power of a dictator over our lives. We don’t have to be a slave to our emotions. We do not have to feel a certain way.
This is why we’re told to take our thoughts captive. This is why Shakespeare, in a clever twist on that, talked about being captives to our thoughts.
The power of story is to take facts and ideas and possibilities and craft a new truth from them. Sometimes, a higher Truth than what we may actually see in the world around us. Fiction may not be true, but it is often True.
In our daily lives, we need to remember that too. That our own stories are only one perspective in this novel of Life. But there are others around us, and they are seeing facts we’re not. Having experiences we’re not. We can’t truly know what someone else’s life is like…until someone tells us their story. Then, suddenly, we can see a different side to Truth.
The challenge I’ve put to myself lately, and which I invite you to take up as well, is to pause when we hear something that immediately makes us feel. To pause, to examine our own reactions, and to seek out what other story someone else is living to make them think differently. Examine the story. Examine their truth. When you do, I bet you’ll come to see their side. I bet–and this is the key–you’ll start to empathize. You’ll start to love them as Christ loves them.
Only then do we really approach His ultimate Truth.
by Roseanna White | Jul 13, 2020 | Word of the Week
(A revisit from 2012)
Is summer hot dog season in your family? This year we’ve started grilling out on our campfire ring every Sunday with my mother-in-law, and hot dogs are pretty much always on the menu. But have you ever wondered where they got their name?
Well, a hot dog is defined as a particular type of sausage, usually served on a split bun. Check. And in the 1890s, sausages were sometimes referred to as “dogs.” Why? Well, ahem, there was apparently a suspicion that some sausages contained dog meat. And while I didn’t see any documentation on it, the articles said this suspicion was “occasionally justified.” Ewww. =(
Anyway. So earning the name “dog” was just because it was in the sausage family. The fact that they were served on buns made them a quick and easy meal when on the go, and apparently a little boy in the 1890s rushed up to a vendor and said, “Give me a hot dog! Quick!” and it stuck. (Yeah, sounds like lure, doesn’t it? LOL)
It was popularized by a cartoon that really got the name stuck. What’s even more interesting is that it only took 6 years from “hot dog” to go from the accepted name of that particular sausage to a verb used when someone’s showing off. By 1906, “Hot dog!” as an expression of approval had gained its place too. So now that we’re moving toward the season of picnics and cookouts, you’ll know why you’re tossing hot dogs on the grill and not frankfurters or weiners or plain ol’ sausages. ?
by Roseanna White | Jul 6, 2020 | Word of the Week
I’m currently reading Siri Mitchell’s State of Lies for my book club (SO GOOD!!!!), in which the heroine is a quantum physicist. (Which her 6-yr-old son calls a fizziest, which made me giggle.) I’ve been thoroughly enjoying all the science jokes on her T-shirts, and her musings about things like black holes.
And I also thought it would fun to take a quick peek at the history of the word. Quantum is directly from Latin, meaning “as much as,” which them in turn came to be “one’s portion.” This word has always been there in Latin, but it wasn’t borrowed for scientific purposes until Max Planck decided to use it in 1900 for these small portions of energy. It was Einstein who then took up the word and made it part of our vernacular, beginning in 1905 when he used the word in his Theory of Relativity; and then in 1912 actually coined the phrase “quantum theory” and, in 1922, “quantum mechanics.”
I do find it rather entertaining that if you look up the word in Merriam-Webster, the noun version means “small increments or parcels,” but the adjective means “large, significant.” Hmm…not sure how that one happened!
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. Having successfully launched two homeschool grads, she now spends her time writing fiction, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years, as well as a fantasy series and contemporary mysteries and romances. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.