Speaking in the Light – Only Use Words When Necessary!

The older that I get in life, the more I am learning that words alone are becoming less meaningful to me. Now this is a pretty heavy confession for someone who uses verbal means of communication for the majority of his livelihood. But it is way too easy to talk a good game without ever having to back it up with actions. You can sound utterly romantic to your spouse and say all the right things, but if you don’t do anything practical to back up your love with your behavior- would you blame your mate if they dare to question your hopeless devotion?
You may be a human almanac of incredible information that can’t help but inform everybody else about how to do everything else, but when it comes to lifting your own fingers- your own hands are always on hiatus. You teach but you don’t lead. You correct but you don’t cooperate. You pontificate but you refuse to participate. You may go to church regularly and sing the praise songs on key and recite the religious rhetoric without a glitch, but if you won’t and don’t do the simplest of requests the Lord may ask of you, is He supposed to buy into your homily of hypocrisy?
There are too many street corner preachers spouting off the word of God without imbibing actively in the works of God. Faith without works is dead and love without application is counterfeit.
I have been in the Dominican Republic all this week experiencing a cherished commodity called Christian community via an avenue that doesn’t come all that natural to me. My actions have had to broadcast better than my vocabulary. Let’s face it, I love to talk and there is rarely a time that I am not using my booming God-given voice to exhort and expound passionately about some terrific topic that might be on the tip of my tongue.
But what happens when you can’t speak the language? What happens when your interpreter is inexplicably suddenly invisible? Do you give up? Do you go silent? Do you leave unsaid what your soul wants to share? Do you know how to kick into gear your charade game playing past into your present? What do you say when your words can’t say a thing at all?
I was walking up the hills through our church neighborhood in San Marcos of Puerto Plato handing out some gifts to the children who call this very poor surrounding their home.
I took Spanish way back in the stone ages when Fred Flintstone and me went to high school together. I know words, but do very poorly in composing them together to construct comprehendible sentences. I so wish i could speak fluently and flawlessly. I have so much I want to say to these precious friends of mine who live in the Dominican Republic. But my words are not much more meaningful to them than the noise of the barking dogs who serenade the streets all through the night.
So what does my life say to them?
What am I talking about with my hands and my feet? When they look into my eyes to do they witness genuine love shining for them there? When they observe my every move, do they maybe mistake me to be the Jesus that I proclaim to so boldly worship? I want all of me to be a life-sized exclamation point to shout out the reality of how awesome the love of God truly is.
When all the gifts were gone and there were no more token toys to pass out to the children, you would have thought that the kids would have all headed for the hills too. So with nothing more materially to offer, and the inability to put three intelligible words together, one might have thought that my job was done, and my sphere of influence was about to cease but not so.
All of a sudden two boys reached for my hands and began to hold them and I could tell they were soaking in the closeness of a father type man displaying unconditional attention to them. Another little girl looked at me with her big brown eyes and motioned for me to please put her on my shoulders and give her a ride.
Three children soon became six children and six became 12 and all I was offering to them was myself. And believe it or not, for that moment, that was all they wanted. And believe it or not, for that moment, that was all I was wanted to share. It was true communion as our hearts came together under God’s umbrella of love and nobody had to say a thing. We all knew clearly what we were feeling and what was being voiced not via the tongue but by the touch of skin to skin.
I will be the first to admit to you all that I talk too much and I hardly ever shut up. Silence and Rudy are not compatible very often. But I do want you to know that I want my life to shout from the highest mountains and sing amidst the lowest valleys and speak it out in the ghettos and behave it out in the highways and byways that God’s love is a verb. Faith is not just words for the subway wall, but the very train itself!
Siempre que me muevo es en ti, junto a ti Christo. Siempre que respiro es en ti! Siempre cada paso es en ti, tu eres mi camino! Siempre que respiro- es en ti! And if you don’t understand a word of what i just wrote, pay attention and look and see because in me I pray that words won’t be necessary to catch the definition of the lifetime mission that God has challenged me to! Words are overrated when it comes to getting the genuine message out anyway! From now on, I will only use words when necessary!