Different Words

"I've been thinking..." vs. "I've been praying..."

"I want to say..." vs. "God is saying..."

"I realized..." vs. "God showed me..."

"I matured..." vs. "God changed my heart..."

"I decided to..." vs. "The Holy Spirit led me..."

"I'm pretty sure..." vs. "I have a peace about it..."

We Christians often talk about our spiritual lives in odd ways. "Christianese," some people call it. We talk about the blood of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, visions and dreams, "being led" by God. Those kinds of things are pretty strange when you first hear them. We use all kinds of peculiar terms and phrases that don't make much sense unless you've been in church for a while. And by "a while," I sometimes mean years.

Even amongst Christians, we talk a little differently. It's like we have different dialects of Christianese. For all of the above phrases, I tend to use the ones on the left most often. I have other friends that will use the ones on the right more often, but we actually mean the same thing.

For example, I like to ask my friend J.P. about stories of his life at Fanshawe College. He will talk about how God led him to this person and that person; how the Holy Spirit gave him words to say; how God planted a seed into that person's life. Likewise, I end up in similar situations but I talk about how I bumped into a friend; how we had a good conversation; what was significant during our talk. God is using us in the same way, I just talk and think about it from another point of view.

As another example, sometimes people sing/play brand new songs all of a sudden during a church service. Songs that they just came to them right then. This can appear to be quite mystical to others, like some sort of hard-to-grasp spiritual experience. For me, though, it's pretty simple.

I recognize that we're coming up to a lull in the service. I think about the topic that we were talking about and sometimes I get one key sentence in my head. I think about it a bit more and I add a second sentence that rhymes or goes with it somehow. I throw in a melody and repeat it a few times silently. Finally, I've written a very short, repetitive song and then I work up the courage to sing it out loudly once there's a gap. It doesn't always work that way but it only takes thirty seconds or so to do.

By experience, I recognize that this is actually the Holy Spirit using me. It's not exactly me writing the song, it's more like the Holy Spirit using my gifts of song writing. Very often, that song ends up being exactly the thing that someone needed to hear. It can help people let their guard down and focus on God a little better. And while I think that it's a very normal thing that almost anyone can do, some people refer to this as a prophectic spontaneous song, as an annointed gift, as the moving of the Holy Spirit. I happen to agree with all of that, my vocabulary just sounds a little off.

My point is, it can be easy for some people to think that I haven't prayed thoroughly about something just because I don't talk that way, and to casually dismiss me because of it. Conversely, I sometimes have a hard time hearing someone else talk about the Holy Spirit "testifying" because I want to know the reasons behind it, not just vague feelings. As long as we recognize this different in dialects, it will help us work together and hear each other a little better.

P.S. As an added bonus, I used this post to give a clearer picture about what this spiritual mumbo jumbo really looks like in my head. It might sound weird to people reading this blog but it seems pretty easy to me. If y'all have questions, feel free to post a comment.