An Inkling
How ‘bout them Nats?!
It’s fun having the hottest team in baseball just up the road.
While I rarely catch a whole game, I see pieces of many,
which means Sarah does too. And over the
years of being married to a baseball fan, she’s picked up a lot of the lingo.
Even so, occasionally she’ll still ask me the meaning of a
term. For example, the announcer says, “And
there’s a comebacker to Strasburg, and he makes the easy toss to first.” And Sarah asks, “What’s a ‘comebacker’?” So I explain what I’ve known since I was a
nine year old little league player. What
was obvious to me from long experience was not at all apparent to her – she who
endured softball in Phys Ed only on the days she couldn’t find a way to skip
class!
Have you ever noticed how specialized baseball lingo is? Tune in and listen sometime, and see how many
of these you can define: looper, pay off
pitch, change up, pitching from the stretch, laying one down, a brush back, and
so on.
It’s well to have such lingo. How cumbersome would it be for the announcers
to describe all of the action in non-lingo terms? Why would an announcer say, “And Harper has
hit a low fly ball over the head of the second baseman, but short of the right
fielder,” when he could simply say, “And Harper has looped to right”? For the sake of brevity and clarity we create
jargon in many fields – not just baseball fields.
So it is with our faith.
It is so much simpler to say “Trinity” than it is to describe the
mystery of God’s being in detail. Our
one word “atonement” abbreviates hundreds of volumes that have sought to
interpret the impact of Jesus’ cross. We
would be hard pressed to have sensible conversations if we lacked such faith jargon.
But, some folks who hear our “broadcast” of the faith won’t
have any more clue of what we’re talking about than did Sarah listening to the
Nats announcers. Can you articulate your
faith in language that anyone can understand?
It’s an important skill for talking with seekers. And as we set aside our lingo, sometimes we discover
that we weren’t so sure ourselves what those words meant!
With my rally cap on,
Keith
