Missing the point

 

Before I share my devotional type thoughts, I wanted to let everyone know there's another massive fire in the Port of Beirut.  Please pray for our team and the whole nation who has already been struggling and is wondering when their suffering might end.  Many have not truly recovered from the trauma of the war and have been retraumatized by the current events.  Pray that they may find rest in God.

For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.   Hebrews 13:14

While we've been stateside we've continued with our Arabic lessons.  We love our teacher and our desire to continue lessons is two fold.  1. We need to continue in order to retain what we've already learned and try as best as possible to continue learning new vocabulary even while stateside.  2. We don't want to put her in a difficult position by interrupting her stream of income, particularly at a time like this.   That being said, trying to continue with lessons online is not the same as in person.  It's more difficult to read body language to check for understanding and correction is more difficult.   A number of letters in Arabic are similar except for the markings above or below the basic form.  It's easy to get an entire word wrong by misplacing a dot or a dash.  Think about this 'I'.  A straight line could be and L, an i, a t someone forgot to cross, a number 1, etc.  In English, I can easily tell which letter or number a form is supposed to be just as a native Arabic speaker can do the same with handwritten passages.   It's harder though when you're learning to read and words don't come as automatic and spelling is a struggle.  My teacher laughs and apologizes when I'm struggling to read something I've copied and she realizes how quickly and imprecisely she scribbled the words out.  (To her credit, she's often writing quickly to transcribe what I'm dictating to her.)

How often do we live out our lives quickly and forget that people are examining what we do in order to replicate it into their own lives?  This may be our children or it may be new believers who want to emulate our behaviors assuming that we are living out the faith we are professing.   Do we miss the point?  Do we place the emphasis in the wrong place completely changing the meaning?  Will they copy our imperfections?  We must be careful to recognize our own mistakes and point to the perfect example in God's word.  We can so easily miscommunicate what a Christian life is supposed to look like because we're going too quickly for one reason or another and not proofreading ourselves.  I don't know about you, but there have been times my children have done or said something that brings conviction because I know they've learned it from me.  I have to go to the Editor in Chief and ask the Holy Spirit to help me make necessary corrections in my own life so they don't have the same errors in theirs.