Thanks for continuing to read my weekly Friday Fragments. I hope they encourage and inspire you. The Fragment below is a piece that I wrote a couple of years ago with the shadow of Good Friday and Easter on my soul.
The letters dance, the timer gets flipped, and the competitors unleash their minds to construct words out of the clutter. Boggle.
Sixteen cubic dice settle into individual boxes inviting a thoughtful evaluation and assembly into words of varying lengths.
Chaotic possibilities finding order. Meaninglessness finding definition.
A game with a prophetic voice. A metaphor waiting for the light of meaning.
Boggle. Letters spilled in front of us. Pregnant with possibility. Poised for either good or evil. Each day, moment by moment the letters tumble in my sight. Words form from the clutter. Poison or promise. The letters stand poised for either.
When my feet hit the floor in the morning… the letters spill. When I walk into my first unexpected encounter. When the phone rings. When a toxic email explodes inside my inbox. Letters waiting in the assembly line of my mind.
The letters spill.
Often my first reaction is to craft words of self-defense and retaliation… of protection and rationalization and vindication. I condemn, because those are easier letters to align.
Words. A collection of letters from the chaos of life that expose the condition of the soul.
In the three years that Jesus ministered on earth, he chose to assemble the random letters of life into words of grace. His settled soul found a vocabulary of love from the letters spilled in front of him. While others were crafting words of hatred, birthed of jealousy and power… Jesus crafted the language of hope.
His critics assembled letters into the word “harlot”, while Jesus spelled “daughter”.
The religious critics of Jesus spelled “love” with the letters LAW. By contrast, Jesus spelled the word “law” with the letters LOVE.
Religious leaders spelled the word “sinner” with masterful precision. Jesus assembled the letters into “forgiven”.
His disciples spelled “nuisance and distraction”, while Jesus, in celestial penmanship wrote “Kingdom keepers”.
To the politically and ethnically elite she was a “Samaritan woman”, to Jesus, she was “sister”.
To many, a “despised tax collector”, to Jesus, “redeemed”.
Over and over Jesus assembled the letters of life into the words of grace… and he invites us and equips us to do the same. To think twice before we reach into the convenient vernacular of condemnation.
Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person. (Colossians 4:6, ESV)
Always gracious. Always assembled with humble thoughtfulness.
Every day, in hundreds of ways… letters are spilled in our path. We choose over and over again how to connect them.
Connect the letters in front of you using the dictionary of love. Make the choice. Look past the first words that assemble in your mind. Push past that poison… all the way to grace.
Our Master was a master at turning the letters of decay into the dialect of life.
Boggle into beauty.
Only Jesus. Always Jesus. Master of the letters of life.
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