Right Words

Right Time

This is a personal photo taken the year Michigan won their National Championship (I apologize that I don’t know where I took it or who designed the poster)

Don’t get me wrong. My picture includes the right words. It’s just the wrong time. Michigan seeks, in this season of March madness, not a football championship, but one in basketball.

Reading through the Bible…Joshua 7-9/Luke 1

Every word (logos) I’ve spoken to you will come true on time—God’s time (kairos).” (Luke 1:20)

In the Genesis creation account, Logos precedes kairos. God makes time before we measure time…and God makes time (kairos) through God’s word (Logos).

Most scientists believe the world gets Big banged into being. Conversely, people of the Book…Jews, Muslims, Christians and others…believe the world gets spoken into being.

At the right time, God speaks the right words. God says, let there be light. (Genesis 1:3)

Those who believe in a Triune God can imagine Father, Son and Spirit talking together long before they say…let us make humankind in our image (Genesis 1:26). There is conversation, before creation.

To put this all back into Luke’s world, there is a right word (logos), that comes from God to Elizabeth and Zachariah, before there is the fulfillment of it in the right time (kairos). The word comes first. The creation of the Baptist comes later.

God speaks a right word through the Angel Gabriel. Still, Elizabeth and Zechariah have to believe it and act on it at the right time…no small feat for an old man and woman, if you know what I mean.

Both the creation of the world and the creation of John the Baptist represent the power of a word spoken (and acted on) in season (Proverbs 15:23).

Writing…

Words, fulfilled in kairos moments, can create. Words, however, can also stagnate, or even worse, devastate.

Words can both be wasted and waste.

With so many words in our world, it is easy to assume that they are disposable. We assume that we have the luxury of throw away words.

We don’t. Especially with AI, we now know that every word we write has the potential to be gathered up by bots and used in ways that we may not have intended.

Even if we don’t write down our words. Even if no one hears the words we speak or think, our words can still have an impact.

Words are not easily wasted. They instead, when used at the wrong time in the wrong way, can function as a kind of radioactive waste.

To "waste someone" is an informal, slang phrase that typically means to kill, murder, or severely defeat someone, often in a violent context. It can also mean to heavily defeat an opponent in a competition or to render someone, or their efforts, ineffective. (bot gathered words from Google AI)

Building…

The Angel Gabriel tells Zechariah that he will not be able to talk until the day he hears his longed for baby cry.

I don’t believe this is punishment. I believe it’s preparation. If there is any situation which requires right word, right time skill it’s raising a child.

Can I get an Amen?

I can look back on my own parenting and say, If I only God would have closed my mouth like Zechariah. Then, at the right time, if only God would have opened my mouth just enough to say then, only what I know now.

We can all, I suspect, think back on times we said the wrong thing at the wrong time.

I want to learn better how to listen and then speak in season. I want to learn better how to hear and to speak right words at the right time…

…After I watch the Michigan Basketball game today.