This evening, I am thinking about rhetoric. It is the artful use of combining what to say, when to say it and how to say it. It is the things you say behind closed doors that persuade the masses that listen. It is an art form by itself. I began to think about the feeling of being a victim of rhetoric. Seems like every traveling evangelist wanted to come and prophesy husbands to the churches made mostly of women wanting husbands. They prophesied money coming for those desperately waiting on it and a way for those who had no way out. Sometimes, I thought that it was abusive. I think it is wrong to play on the feelings of the broken for an offering. It is wrong to say something just to get the desired response. Rhetoric at times can be an elaborate form of lying. We lie to change or distort the truth. The truth was, that sometimes, I sat in insufficient places. These were places where my dreams would never come true. Rhetoric decorated those slums and ghettos with glossy trinkets that were just gilded pieces of wood. The truth chipped that gold film away and I decided that it was better to see things as they are, than to deceive my own self. I believe there is beauty in describing an old weather beaten barn as an old weather beaten barn. Beauty is at it's best when we have to find it in the mist of ordinary, plain humanity with not a fresh coat of paint nowhere. A truly sad victim of rhetoric is the person who would rather hear a bunch of trumped up lies, than a single line of unadulterated truth.
Do Me Wrong Do Me Right James Taylor
http://youtu.be/3C9w9qGQixw
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Nothing to wear
I am a female and subject to games played on females. Every season, something comes out on the runway that you just have to have. If you don’t have it, then you are out of style and God forbid that you are out of style. In fact, you can look at all the clothes in your closet and deem them irrelevant because they don’t match what you saw on the television set. You can feel such a sense of lack even in the midst of abundance. Now, my life is in pieces. I have had the privilege of spending my life in several places. Most of them don’t flow together. Most of the people in those places will never meet each other. If I focus only on where I am and not where I have been, I feel this immense sense of loneliness like my life is lacking something when really it is abundant. Recently, I began to reconnect with parts of my life that I thought were dead. Just like that, my life had meaning and I smiled a genuine smile. It is alright to embrace where you have been. That is your history. That is your life. I don’t want to reduce my life to a handful of faces and forget the wonderful networks I left to be among a handful of faces. I don’t want to be looking at a closet full of great clothes and feeling like I have nothing to wear.
Not Enough Time
Today, my mind goes to a friend, not a dear friend, just a friend. Seems like mistakes were made a plenty and now we both are in the middle of our lives. Some of the mistakes made are things that will heal with time. Some mistakes are things that just don’t have enough time to heal. God would have to stretch the age and the strength into a span of lifetime that is not even realistic. The bottom line is that some mistakes will just have to be taken to the grave. Those are the kind of mistakes I don’t like. I don’t like the ones that won’t be corrected until the next generation, if the next generation is even mine to ask for. I don’t know about you, but that brings me peace. The old folks used to say, ”It is what it is”. It is alright just to let some wrong things stay wrong. You add to the wrongness of situations when you meddle to make it right without the wisdom and the timing of God. You do more damage trying to change something when it is not time for it to be changed yet your time to be with the unchanged thing has simply run out. I have learned to leave places that are wrong and not worry about what will happen to it. The healing of it is beyond me. Healing it will kill me. I know you want me to stay until things are right, but I can’t. I don’t have time to wait until things are right. It may never be right. My portion on this earth is an appointed time and when my time has come, I will leave and trust your restoration to God who is certainly bigger than I.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)