Recently, I was checking on a new friend and ended a text with “see you Tom.” The next day, when I saw my friend, he said to me, “Hey. Yesterday you sent me a message that was meant for someone else.” I said, “No, I texted you yesterday. Why did you think it was for someone else?” He reached into his phone and pulled up the text message and said, “Look, right here at the end of the message it says ‘see you Tom’.” Smiling, I said softly, “That wasn’t for Tom. He was saying see you tomorrow.”
It’s so easy to forget how fickle our intended communications can be. The text message incident reminded me of an experience I had helping my son with his reading last year while his mother was away. As he read to me, he kept adding the letter “L” to words in places where it didn’t belong. I was feeling quite frisky that day and decided to gently joke with him about the strange misplacement of the “L”. I playfully said, “Where in the world do those ‘L’s come from?” As a joke, I pretended to look under his book, other papers that were there and under the table. I told him that I couldn’t find any “L” hidden anywhere. I gently shook my head at him and said, “I bet those ‘L’s are hiding in that head of yours.” So I told him to turn his head to the side. He did as I asked and I shook my head a bit and said, “We just need to shake off all those extra ‘L’s.” We laughed and he finished his reading for the day with no more problems with the “L’s”. Later that day, his mom came home and asked my son how reading with dad was going. Thoughtfully, he replied, “It started out pretty bad, but then Dad took the ‘L’ away from me and I started doing really well.” That is an absolutely true story.
How often are our intended communications corrupted when they are filtered through people’s perception? Sometimes the corrupted information is conveyed in comical ways. Most of the time, corrupted information results in some kind of emotional, mental, and/or spiritual damage and confusion. As parents, we deal with the reality of corrupt information all the time. From time to time we can laugh at the result. Most of the time we remain like insects trapped in a miserably constructed web of painful, deadly, and chaotic confusion. Conflict results and relationships suffer.
It is such a wonderful reality that God has perfectly communicated his message of love to us through his word. Graciously, He provides his spirit to help govern and sweeten our communication with Him. Unlike us, when God communicates, He has the ability to send his sweet Spirit to aid in understanding and proper application of the communication. will of him. I see daily how I am not able to communicate properly with my children. I feel so inadequate to adequately and effectively communicate everything my children need to hear. Praise be to God for the love, mercy, grace, justice, and provision in which He perfectly communicates His will to us. May we confess and repent of the corrupt communication of our nature that disables, discourages and destroys. May we immerse ourselves in his perfect word so that our ears hear, our hearts listen and our bodies react to our Father’s communication. As we do so, may the message of our life’s work effectively communicate its glory to our children and generations to come.