Power of words
Jeff Goins has a great blog post on the Revolutionary Power of Words. Appropriate for Americans on Independence Day!
Squirrel-itis
In the movie Up, a dog with teeth bared moving in for the win could be distracted by the call, “Squirrel!” The dog’s head instantly rotated in search of the new prey.
That problem isn’t just with dogs. My sister and I have been struggling with the same issue.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
I recently had a couple of errands to run before visiting my mother, who is currently living in a nursing home. From the bank, I headed downtown for errand #2 – picking up a part from an appliance store. One block before I arrived at the store, I instead turned right onto Main Street and drove back across town to the nursing home.
Two hours later, I realized I hadn’t snagged the part I needed.
Squirrel!
A few days ago, my teenage son and I headed out on a day-long trip. Before we walked out of the house, I reminded him, “You ought to take a water bottle with you.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said and filled a stainless steel bottle pulled from the cupboard.
Then we got into the car and I buckled in. “Oh,” I said. “I forgot my water bottle.”
I got out of the car, headed back toward the house, and he rolled down his window. “Would you grab mine while you’re in there?”
Squirrel!
My sister is working with an essential oil that is supposed to help with distractedness. I’m calling it squirrel oil and, if it helps her, I may mainline the stuff.
The Bible: Jael’s imagery
A woman killing a military hero makes for an unexpected story and Jael’s grisly slaying in the book of Judges contains an striking motif that uses vivid images to make the story spring to life.
The account of Jael and Sisera takes place within the story of Deborah, a judge of Israel who led a great victory over the army of Jabin, king of Canaan, lead by Sisera.
Sisera’s army is routed in spite of its superiority and Sisera flees on foot, with Barak, the Israelite general, in pursuit. Sisera flees to the tent of Jael, assuming to find sanctuary because of the peace between Jabin and Jael’s husband, Heber.
A nurturing, maternal motif forms in the story. Jael is first seen in her tent and comes out to invite Sisera in. Twice she calls him to “turn aside” and tells him to have no fear. The tent, as the woman’s domain, can be seen as a womb. In inviting Sisera to enter, there is a sense of protection as a baby in a womb.
That imagery continues as she covers Sisera with a rug as a mother might cover a baby. He asks her for a drink of water like a child might ask its mother. Jael, however, gives Sisera milk – more than he asked for and more comforting – and then covers him again, evoking further images of a mother and baby.
Sisera asks Jael to stand guard at the door of the tent and tell any men, “There is no man within.” From Sisera’s point of view, he has commanded her to protect him by lying, confident in his military authority. But Sisera has figuratively regressed from manhood to childhood in blindly trusting Jael; there really is no man within the tent.
Sisera sleeps like a baby, for although he has the leader of the opposition chasing him, he is able to trust Jael enough to sleep.
She takes up the hammer and tent peg – tools of a woman in that culture because they were the ones who moved the tents– and goes quietly to him like a mother tiptoeing to her child’s bedside to check his breathing while he sleeps.
However, the story violently twists and Jael drives the peg into Sisera’s head, killing him.
Jael is a hero to her people and yet the imagery makes us squeamish. We grapple with the motif twisted. How could a mother betray her baby? Why did Sisera relinquish his trust and his life to this woman?
Striking use of imagery makes Jael’s story a powerful one with many questions to be explored.
Not supposed to happen
This puppet show was not supposed to happen.
After traveling over 1200 miles to work for a small church in Mexico, including preparing a 30-minute puppet performance for their children, I was bedridden with the flu and a 102-degree temperature all week.
Fortunately I was part of a team that worked without me but I was in charge of the puppet show.
By Sunday morning, when the performance was planned, I felt well enough to help prepare the props and set up our stage.
And then two of our teenage puppeteers approached us, faces like a birthday child with no gifts. “We just found out that Mary bought drug paraphernalia this week and tried to hide it in Teresa’s suit case.”
What do you say to that?
Mary had joined our team at the last minute and no one knew her very well. We just hadn’t realized how un-well we knew her. I envisioned a church team getting busted at the border for paraphernalia possession – and sweet Teresa getting the blame.
Nothing like a little distraction when you’re trying to put a performance together.
We drew in a team breath – no easy task when half the team was still hyperventilating over Mary’s deception – and continued on. The props were ready, puppets laid about, puppeteers ready – and the electricity went out. We needed electricity for our music.
Power outages, we learned, were not uncommon in this neighborhood. Why hadn’t we packed batteries for the CD player? For the same reason we had let Mary join the team. Not thinking well.
We dispatched someone to buy batteries. He returned with four D batteries purchased for $20, which was highway robbery, and we punched them into our player. We then found out what highway robbery really is: buying batteries that were dead for $20.
So my innovative husband threw himself into building an adapter that would run the CD player off a car battery. Visualize that. The car battery was bigger than the CD player.
He stripped wires and taped ends together. Five minutes before the performance time, he gave me a thumbs up.
And then the electricity came on.
We completed the show and then the lights went out again.
But the audience applauded our show and several came forward with questions and commitments for the pastor.
In spite of the flu, Mary the paraphernalia smuggler, and power issues, the puppet show that couldn’t happen did happen. And with a resounding “yes!”
Perseverance matters.
The Bible: working with non-heroes
Although Esther in the Old Testament has a book named after her, the Bible portrays her as a hero who didn’t start out that way.
The book of Esther relates how the Jewish people, under a genocide order by a duped Persian king, were saved by insomnia and a reluctant queen.
Often we see Esther as a brave hero – and she was in the end. But her transformation is part of the story. She didn’t start out a hero.
Instead, she became queen through a king of beauty contest, at her uncle’s wish.
Her uncle, Mordecai, is the hero of this story and Esther is the person transformed. Mordecai was courageous and concerned about others. Not only did he want to protect the Jews, but he saved the king’s life at one point.
Esther, once brought into the king’s palace, remained rather anonymous. The court people did not realize she was a Jew, which indicates that she probably did not hold to a kosher lifestyle. When the news of the order against the Jews came to her ears, she didn’t do anything.
Mordecai prompted her to approach the king and she, at first, hesitated. When she learned of Mordecai in sackcloth, she told him to stop mourning.
But then she learned of her people’s problem and she, in an amazing character transformation, grasped her destiny.
When Esther decided to act, she revealed the courage and character that she needed to complete her destiny. But she didn’t step forward in giddy confidence. “If I perish, I perish,” she told Mordecai.
God is never mentioned in the book of Esther. Even when Esther asks for “fasting,” we wonder why she didn’t ask for “prayer and fasting.”
But the providential events – from a shy but beautiful Jewish girl being selected as queen of Persia to a king who couldn’t sleep and instead was reminded of Mordecai’s kindness to him – signal something amazing going on behind the scenes.
In our storytelling economy, we would have placed the brave and wise Mordecai in a position to save the people. We would not have chosen a quiet queen content to hide.
(Esther’s name in Hebrew could be Mistar, related to mystery and similar to I am hidden.)
Yet this non-hero stepped up when called upon, providing victory and salvation to the Jews.
The Bible relates the stories of non-heroes with stunning results.
