For Wilshire Baptist Church
Every once in a while something will click in my head and I will realize how amazing something is – something that seems so simple and common that we take it for granted and yet if I pause to consider it I realize how it is remarkable beyond words.
That happened to me this morning. I was driving south on Interstate 45 under a gray sky when suddenly there was the reflection of sunlight on the hood of the car. I looked up to the east and could see the sun peeking from behind the shredding veil of the clouds. It looked like a yellow-white disk with clean edges and I could see it without hurting my eyes. And for a brief moment I had a recollection of being a kid and laying on my back in the yard and looking up at the afternoon sun and thinking that it was so close that I could reach up and touch it with my hand. And I was surprised by that memory but also surprised to realize how rarely I ever look up at the sun or give it any thought at all and yet it brings us light and warmth and weather and life itself.
I had a similar experience last week. I was listening to music on the radio and then there was an ad about legal services and I had this sudden bright-white realization of how amazing language is. There was a man on the radio creating sounds by pushing the air in his lungs through his mouth and his nose, and I could hear those sounds with my ears and then my brain was translating those sounds into words and words into sentences that had precise meanings that I could fully understand.
And that came back into my thoughts this morning after looking at the sun while driving because one of my errands was to take some recordings of those types of sounds to someone who wanted to hear them and save them.
In a recent office cleanup I came upon a pile of cassette tapes of interviews I had with people in the early 1980s. Among the tapes were interviews with Abner McCall and Herbert Reynolds, two esteemed former presidents of Baylor University. And there were tapes of people who were part of our local and state history at the time: Mark White, Bill Clements, Erik Jonsson, Byron Nelson, Don Carter, Linus Wright, Bum Bright, Tex Schramm, Don Carter. If you are of a certain age and heard just a snippet of some of those voices, you would be able to identify them immediately. And thanks to the miracle of this thing we call language, you would know exactly what they were saying, and that in turn would generate thoughts and memories of specific times and places in your life. It really is a miracle when you think about it. What’s more, it is the workings of a creator who is as ever-present as the sun and yet we take so much of that creation for granted.
This Sunday in the Christian church we will celebrate or remember Pentecost, that day in the early church when the Holy Spirit came over the people gathered in Jerusalem and they suddenly were gifted with the ability to speak to each other and understand each other even though they came from different lands and spoke different languages. That was a miracle of course and yet we take it for granted because we take for granted the fact that when we speak even the same language we can understand it. But the sad thing is that so many people are talking today and few people are listening. Talking is half of the miracle; listening and understanding is the other half.
I’ve written this quickly because I just got home from my errands and I have some other appointments tonight. It may seem disjointed and it probably is, but I give myself a deadline to write something every Tuesday and so here it is. And I’m counting on another miracle: that you will see these words and your miraculous minds will translate them into meanings and you will find something in the meanings to think about.