We are surrounded by words in every arena we find ourselves in. Words bombard us from the time we wake up until we go to bed at night and sometimes words replaying in our head continue after we have tried to settle into our cozy bed. For some of us, that is way beyond our comfort level because too many words interfere with how we process information, so we are tempted to tune out or leave the noise and find a quieter place.

Others of us enjoy words. We love to read, write, chat for hours, and they can be a primary way we received affirmation from others. But even if we fit into that category, never in history have we had so many mechanisms promoting words for us to read or hear (many times ones that we weren’t looking for). Even word lovers can get weary ears and eyes.

Some of us are old enough to remember life before cell phones, iPads, computers, or TV’s that had programming 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It was a simpler time and way of life. We barely noticed as we crept to where we are now, but this week as I watched parents taking their kids to college with heart strings tugging as they drove away from the campus, I was reminded of how different this experience will be for them versus my husband and me.

When my husband and I were going to college, we left with manual typewriters, a few suitcases and boxes and a stash of snacks. We were lucky if we had a car and phone calls were via a pay telephone. Writing letters were the only other options. By the time our children were heading off to college, they had electronic typewriters, more boxes, hot plates, refrigerators, and more. Sometimes there were chairs and small couches that needed a grandparents’ pickup truck to make it all happen, but communication was still via letter or standing in line at a pay phone to talk. Now those heartstrings pull as you drive away from campus, but cell phones will soon buzz, and FaceTime or Zoom won’t be far behind. Snacks can be delivered right to the dorm room through any number of options and typewriters of any kind are for museums. With computers and tablets of all kinds, this makes trips to the library for research far less necessary most days.

These are all great and give a lot more options for staying in touch, but they all still rely on words. How do they make up for a hug, or a cup of cocoa or coffee made by a loving mom when you’re over your head with studying and unsure you can really survive the rigorous demands you discover at this new level of education?

We talk often of love and see it spoken of or depicted on film or print many times over, but what we most need is that someone shows us love. It reminds me of the classic scene in My Fair Lady. You may recall or know the epic movie or even have seen the stage production. Eliza Doolittle has been recruited by Professor Henry Higgins to prove his point that he can transform a Cockney working-class girl into someone who can pass for a cultured member of high society. He puts Eliza through rigorous and often unkind practices, and it makes for more than a few clashes. A high-class suitor named, Freddy, who is the son of a friend of Professor Higgins is smitten with Elisa and keeps offering words of adoration to her. She is fed up with “words, words, words” and sings about what she most wants in the Lerner and Lowe song, “Show Me.” Some of the lyrics express how she feels as she sings, “Words! Words! Words!
I’m so sick of words! I get words all day through…” The song continues with her admonishing Freddy not to talk about love but to show her his love.

Yes, we love to be told we are loved, but if it is only words, they will fall short. If I am struggling and you remind me that you love me, that’s nice but it’s better if you invite me to coffee, come sit with me and listen to what’s going on, or give me a hug. If I have been overwhelmed taking care of an aging parent, don’t just tell me that it’s hard and you’ll pray for me, bring me a meal, or offer to come stay with them so I can go out to get a haircut or run some errands without worry. We love words, but we need to see the demonstration of them, or the words will just be words when we need to see love.

And there’s the challenge…showing love will always cost more than saying it. Showing will mean I need to set aside my own plans or preferences, boost my empathy and be love to that person. Sadly, it’s one of the places where we falter more often than we want to admit. In my lifetime I have been blessed by many people, but there are some acts of love that are so selfless and cherished that years later I recall them as if they had just happened. One example that never fails to come to mind is of a friend who came to our house to take my husband to pick up my car the morning after I had been hit by a car while walking in my office parking lot. This friend drove over a half hour that morning. She knew I was in great pain from so much soft tissue damage, and it was a gift for her to make this trek for us, but she went beyond that. When she arrived, she brought us a roast beef dinner that she had prepared for us. That was showing love!

The other example that always leaps out is when our youngest grandson and his family were staying at our house following specialized outpatient hand surgery from out of state. We (his parents and us) had him (under a year old), his three siblings, and a lot to deal with that we felt ill-equipped to handle. One of the first nights, we were trying to sort out what to do about bandaging and I called a friend who was a nurse who lived an hour away. When she heard what was happening, she packed a bunch of supplies and drove down later that night and brought us all we needed and showed us how to do handle it. That was showing love!

God understands that we have that need. He had given so many words to us to tell us who He was and who we were, but we still couldn’t grasp that He really loved us. We couldn’t keep the laws He had spoken, and hard stuff kept happening. That didn’t seem like love (ignoring we had a part to play in all that). So, He chose to show us and it cost Him everything. Jesus stepped up and offered to come to a poor couple as a baby and then live love out for us all to see and offered to die on a Roman cross to show us the truth of his love. He demonstrated and taught us that was what love was supposed to look like if we believed in Him. The Gospels in the New Testament show us example after example of love showing up in more than spoken words.

How are we showing love (especially to those who are hard to love) or does it cost us too much? (It’s never about the money, always about putting ourselves aside for someone else.) God showed us love because it was his very nature to love. Is it ours because of Him?

Photo by Czapp Arpad from Pexels

Technology. It seems that we love it, hate it, or don’t understand it. Sometimes it can be all of these at the same time. It keeps moving forward trying to help us do things better, faster, or easier and now adds a little help with AI. Whether those goals get met or not can be a toss-up and perhaps more so if we were born before most of the devices for those under age 25 find common.

I like to think I am reasonably savvy with my computer, iPad, and iPhone but when I wear out one version I know and face a new model I feel like I am starting all over again. And that happened again last week when my iPhone of 7 years needed to be replaced. Everyone was very helpful at the store in telling me how to use it and what it could do but then the word widget came up and nothing in my brain connected with what it was or what it did even though I had seen the word before on my computer and somewhat ignored it. 

Now I learned that I could determine how and what pattern I wanted to use to set up my widgets and I had no clue. They assured me that I could come in for a session on all this and I left hoping the latest You Tube video would point me in the right direction by first defining what a widget is and what I use it for. Of course some of you are chuckling because you already know all that. 

So the search engine took me to this definition: “Widgets are small applications or components that provide specific functions or display information within a graphical user interface. They allow users to interact with software or access information quickly without opening a full application.”  Hmmmm. 

Photo by Cottonbro studios from Pexels

Digging a little further I found that the word widget replaced the words like gadget and gizmo in the times past I grew up in. My question still wasn’t answered about whether it was a distraction or some help to me.

What I know I don’t need are more distractions in my life. I tend to be a pretty focused, self-disciplined person and don’t struggle with distractibility as much as many others do and yet I am not immune to it. I know our brains are constantly on the go like conveyor belts of old with bits and pieces of information sitting on that conveyor belt running all the time. Most of the time I don’t notice it but every so often some shiny object catches my eye and my attention as well and the conveyor belt stops along with whatever direction toward a goal I was pursuing.

It can happen in the midst of an assigned task or even while pursuing something I love and want to attend to like my devotional time each morning. I love that time and count on it to keep me growing and connected to my relationship with God. I set myself up for success I think. I always use the same chair with coffee nearby along with a pen, journal, and my Bible. Experience has shown me that this time makes all the difference in how my day will go and despite a list of “to do’s,” I will accomplish more if I don’t skip it or cut it short. Even with my best effort a widget on that conveyor belt in my brain can grab my attention for a moment and urge me to follow it down some rabbit trail.

Where is Brother Lawrence when I need him?  Some of you have doubtless heard of him as the author of the little gem entitled The Practice of the Presence of God that focuses on finding God in everyday experiences and learning to cultivate a continuous awareness of God’s presence. More than a few years ago someone loaned me their copy and I read it and found it impactful. 

His quotes are full of wise counsel and conviction. One example is:

“In order to know God, we must often think of Him; and when we come to love Him, we shall then also think of Him often, for our heart will be with our treasure.”

I do know God and think of Him often and want to know Him better. I also love Him and the more that love has grown the more often I think of Him and yet there are times when I am distracted that I feel like the Apostle Paul in Romans 7 when he laments he decides one way and then acts another. That busy conveyor belt has grabbed my attention when that was not my desire. The enemy of my soul who doesn’t want me to focus on God puts some little widget on the belt that catches my eye. 

I can once again be warring with widgets and then reminded of Paul’s second letter to the church at Corinth to take every thought captive. 

How grateful I am for others who faced widgets even though they didn’t call them that. They encourage my heart to not let them undo my desire to spend time with the Lover of my Soul whom I most desire to spend time with. They remind me that if the enemy of my soul did not know I loved God so much, he would not try to catch my attention on his little devices.

“Do not be discouraged by the resistance you will encounter from your human nature; you must go against your human inclinations. Often, in the beginning, you will think that you are wasting time, but you must go on, be determined and persevere in it until death, despite all the difficulties.”  Brother Lawrence

Photo by Aydın Kiraz from Pexels

In the 1920’s George Gershwin was always hard at work creating new music for the world to enjoy and when he had settled on a composition, he sent it to his brother, Ira, to write the lyrics. Over and over the brothers created music that many still enjoy today, but sometimes it would be a challenge for Ira to create lyrics to match the tempo or rhythm of what George had written.

One song created a problem for Ira because he couldn’t come up with lyrics that rhymed. That problem led to him writing lyrics in prose and that song became the well-known “I’ve Got Rhythm” that was first used in a slower tempo in the musical Treasure Girl. Then in 1930, it became a toe-tapping hit in a bouncy rhythm in the musical Girl Crazy. This song with its recognizable chord progression and almost all the black keys in an octave (pentatonic scale) in the first half of the tune produced a template for jazz musicians to riff on. Those rhythm changes became the standard 32-bar progression in jazz.

Music impacts us on so many levels. It sets our feet in motion, gets us up and out of our routine, affects our mood and can set our emotional thermostat. It inspires and echoes in our memory long after the music stops. Many of our favorite memories will have music associated with them and seem sharper and clearer because of them. Music has so much power that it has been used therapeutically in a variety of settings and whether you are someone with ‘two left feet’ or someone who floats on the dance floor, it can be hard to resist.

Beyond formal music and its various genres, tempos, and progressions, nearly every aspect of our lives is governed by rhythms. It would seem God set the world in motion in rhythm to help guide us along through our lifetime. There are the rhythms of day and night that point to work and sleep rhythms that help us maintain the bodily interior rhythms we need for activity and rest. There are also the rhythms of the solar system and the alignment of plants that impact the seasons of each hemisphere on our planet. Most of us are about to transition to a new rhythm and season in the next few weeks. For some it will be moving into spring and others it is a shift to autumn and a return to the pattern that sets up around weather and school calendars as we march toward the end of the calendar for the year.

You may not be musical or even love music even though that is hard to believe given all the types and options out there. Even so, you also have a personal rhythm that is uniquely yours. That tempo can be affected by the circadian rhythm that matches with you. Some of us are early risers with our minds and imaginations actively working as the sun edges over the horizon while others of us prefer a slower, later start to the day and come alive as the night sounds start with the setting of the sun.

There are other rhythms that each of us have that gives us the flow of our day. Some of us cannot even think about food in the morning and skip breakfast much of the time while still eager to grab a cup of coffee or some other favorite beverage. Others of us love breakfast any which way you serve it and how we view meals and times we have them can be affected by the culture and the season in which we find ourselves.

You may be someone who is eager to engage at some point in the day. It may be morning, afternoon, or evening and it will be good if you pay attention to that so your partner or friend isn’t at a disadvantage because that timing doesn’t match for them.

Our personal rhythm often influences how we schedule our calendars, but schedule and rhythm are not synonymous. It’s our rhythms that seem to set the habits we end up practicing over time more than the schedules we can have a love/hate relationship with. When anything or anyone interferes with our preferred rhythm to our days, we tend to feel “off” and not quite as amenable as we might ordinarily be. Add a doctor’s appointment to our day, throw in an unexpected weather event, add a crisis we didn’t see coming, and we are trying to find our balance.

You may think the rhythm of your day is not that big a deal, but you wouldn’t be accurate on that. The rhythm of our days, weeks, months, and years may vary but together those become habits for us and what becomes habitual shapes our lives and our character even if you hadn’t noticed.

A major rhythm change is when we enter school and when school ends for us, not just year by year, but when we have finished this many years cycle that guides us through childhood and into our teen years and affects every adult with school age children. Another major rhythm change is when we leave our families and live a single life or marry someone and need to adjust to a rhythm we have lived with for a long time. Retirement is another major rhythm change we notice, one that some embrace and enjoy and one that others find throws them out of sync for a bit of time.

Our spiritual rhythm is one that we tend to have as well and along with how our rest and sleep manage our health, this rhythm of worship, prayer, and reflection is one God has pointed to as significant in how our lives are shaped over time. Our rhythm either makes God and our faith the centerpiece we relate with daily or puts it as just a part where we can fit it in. Our choice will have a long-term effect on every aspect of our life.

Whether your spiritual rhythm rhymes or is guided by prose, it will little by little shape who you are with God, others, and the place in the world you find yourself. It will be one you move to and propels you to the final lines of the music your life creates.

What is your rhythm?

Are you someone who wants things to match? You like your shoes and purse to match the outfit you are wearing. You like the colors and decor of your house to match and compliment the atmosphere you want to create. You have always been the one who loved coloring books and they showed the same tendency. You feel out of sync when things aren’t matching.

No, not everyone is quite as particular about matching as others of us. We don’t think much about whether our shoes are blue, and our outfit is black or whether all the plates on the dinner table match when we have guests coming. Some of us don’t notice those things, those details. And then there are some of us that land somewhere between those two opposites.

One of the things I recall about the young lady who later became our daughter-in-law was that she seemed to have socks that matched the same color as any and every outfit (even colors others would find hard to match). I loved that about her and never could quite figure out how she accomplished it after trying it from time to time myself.

Years later I had a friend whose daughter was a fashion consultant and when she looked at my closet and how I put outfits together, she admonished me not to always try to be “matchy-matchy.”

Some of us recall days of dressing alike for school events or occasions and popularity of matching mother and daughter dresses as well. Then there are those challenges of looking for dresses that look great on everyone and still match for the bridesmaids of a wedding party. Now that often makes for a difficult task. How many ladies’ heights and today’s styles look great in the same dress anyway?

But there is one place that matching is far more critical to consider. Do our words and actions match?

We use words all the time for all different means of communication. Some are well considered, and others just casually tossed out, but in both cases the hearer or reader will learn much about us if what we say and what we do don’t match up. Sometimes the dissonance can happen because we weren’t thinking when we spoke (or weren’t listening). Far more often than we might wish, words come out in a flash, and we can’t take them back. Commitments we make are left unfulfilled because it takes more courage to not accept what we were asked if we have no excuse we believe would be accepted.

Most of us have had something like that happen and we didn’t mean to be dishonest when it did, but if we tend to have words and actions that do not match our character tends to come into question. Whether we like it or not, our actions speak more of what is truly in our heart and mind than our words often do. The old adage some people said, “Do what I say, don’t do what I do,” is not good advice. This is especially true in our closest relationships – husbands and wives, parents, and children.

With so much of our communication taking place on electronic devices in sound bites rather than complete sentences without body language and tone inflection for extra clarity, miscues can happen more easily than ever before. We can also forget that the volume of the words spoken does not add to our understanding of the intent of the words. Emojis get added to things with no awareness of whether the person knows the meaning of the emojis or the abbreviated word. Little wonder that we get farther and farther away from clear consistent communication. When handwritten letters were the currency of communication, we may have put far more thought into them because they may have been written with pen and ink and had no delete or erase function as an option.

Why does it matter so much if the two (words and actions) don’t match? The answer is very straightforward. Our actions reflect more accurately our intent and what is in our heart than the words we say (no matter how eloquently spoken). Relationships are broken because of words and actions not matching.

“Words may show a man’s wit but actions his meaning.”

Benjamin Franklin

Scripture admonishes us about making promises:

“And don’t say anything you don’t mean. This counsel is embedded deep in our traditions. You only make things worse when you lay down a smoke screen of pious talk, saying, ‘I’ll pray for you,’ and never doing it, or saying, ‘God be with you,’ and not meaning it. You don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. Just say ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ When you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong.”

Matthew 5:37 (MSG)

The lesson in all this is likely that it is wisdom to slow down the pace of our words, and reduce the amount of them, to assure that the actions that follow them are matching.

We live in a world bombarding us with input and how often do we evaluate the input for its usefulness, accuracy, or impact on the output. Techies and some others of us are familiar with the phrase, “garbage in, garbage out.” It’s used to express the idea that in computing and other spheres, incorrect or poor- quality input will always produce faulty output. If you use computers for much of your day or spend time in audio or video production, you know exactly what that means. But what about the rest of us who notice our inboxes fill up without much thought to its source or intent?

Input comes from other sources as well and has a distinct impact on the output. Young children get a lot of input. It comes from parents and any other adult in their lives as well as other children and media they get exposed to. (Think about how often you see a toddler playing with an adult’s cell phone or tablet.) Each bit of data from whatever the source starts to set up influence that can become habit and habits are powerful things.

Input begins for each of us as we awaken from sleep. The input of the alarm or whatever we use to awaken us and past input influences what we do or say next. Some of us will be eager for the input and a podcast (radio in olden days) or music immediately gets turned on as we head for the shower and cleaning up for the day. That input sets the tone for the day in energy and attitude many times, but it doesn’t stop there. Past input will influence what we choose to wear after we pop out of the shower and if we take time for a healthy breakfast that gives us the healthy energy we need or if we grab a cup of coffee and head out the door.

If you’re not sure how healthy that choice of breakfast is, most of you will know by mid-morning. Your energy will either still be giving you all you need, or you’ll be searching for someone to make a new pot of coffee and scrounging in your pockets or drawers for a leftover candy bar or other snack. Because no matter how you feel about breakfast, our bodies were designed to run on fuel and absent putting good fuel in the tank in the morning, our performance will not be optimal (no matter what you tell other people about not needing breakfast).

And it’s not just those things that impact our day and get the big influence in how it goes and how we manage whatever life throws at us. Will our “diet” of information come from whatever source of news we prefer? If so, we will be inundated with primarily bad news of tragedy, potential catastrophes, and a long list of arguments to rankle our senses and prepare us for the first debate we run into with someone else without much thought about whether it fits with our value system or was even accurate. The biggest influencers of that day are counting on us not considering any of that. They just want you to buy the thing, the idea, or the suggestion and go with it. Little wonder the laws get passed on every level of government that leave us scratching our heads. Politicians cobble together hundreds of pages (sometimes thousands) and give their own preferred synopsis of all that urging colleagues to vote for the law or bill. Colleagues have little time to read, digest, or consider any data supporting the law and decide. Little wonder it is often “garbage in, garbage out.”

If we are honest, we don’t think much about the habits being formed in our lives or where those we have even come from let alone their impact.

“As far as habits go, the invisible reality is this: We are all living according to a specific regimen of habits, and those habits shape most of our life.

A habit is a behavior that occurs automatically, over and over, and often unconsciously. A study from Duke University suggested that as much as 40 percent of the actions we take every day are not products of choices but of habits.”

Justin Whitmel Earley in The Common Rule

Some of you may be thinking we need to be better educated and that is likely true for us no matter what level of education we have attained, but that is not enough as Earley notes:

“Education is what you learn and do – things you are taught. Formation is what you practice and do – things that are caught.”

Justin Whitmel Earley in The Common Rule

These adults in our lives teach us many things on purpose, but most of us catch a lot of things they may not have intended. You may discover that when someone says of you, “You do just what your mom did with that.” We catch whether words are shouted or spoken with kindness. We catch the beliefs and values that are lived more strongly than some that are taught from all the sources that are giving us input. Hypocrisy can show up in the blink of an eye when a child suddenly uses a bad word in a public setting that they heard and learned at home from the very best of parents.

If the input in the physical realm and educational realm are significant to provide us with a healthy life and the energy to sustain it, what input goes into our spiritual life?

It’s been said that what we spend time on and becomes habitual points to what we worship. Ouch!!

If the only input we receive spiritually is maybe a Sunday worship service, how does that help sustain us when the darkness of the world increases and shadows fall across even things we thought would never succumb to them? What fuels our spiritual life and formation? Does it include daily nourishment by having time in the Bible and solidify the foundation of our faith, time in prayer to acknowledge our need for grace, mercy, help, and more? And if we want to teach our children these habits, do they see us doing them as well?

Making that input a priority will mean adjusting the other input habits that we have grown used to having, but they can make all the difference on so many levels and clarify our purpose as well.

“Habits are how we stand up and get our hands on time. And because time is the currency of our purpose, habits are how we get our hands on our purpose.

All those who want to be attentive to who they are becoming must realize that formation begins with a framework of habits.”

Justin Whitmel Earley in The Common Rule