Today’s groovy topic might cause you to flip your wig if you can’t dig it. It will play with your head. I’m hoping this blog will make you mellow and not be a bummer, but who knows. It might just send you trippin’. Slang. We all use it. Check Google, and you can find popular slang by the decade to refresh your memory. That doesn’t even include jargon, which is work slang developed around any job or work type or situation.

Each generation creates its own way of saying things, short cuts, slapped-together metaphors, references, allusions, images, or, now, techno types of things like emojis. I’m sure the parents of Egyptian teens were wondering what the teens were saying during the time the pyramids were being built. It seems to be human nature.

Slang is a way of inclusion and exclusion. It separates those in the know from those who aren’t. Civil war youth had an entire language with fans, flowers, and gloves to give dating cues to the opposite sex in ways that the parental chaperones could not get. Slang can be subversive. It is weaponized communications used in many ways to include, exclude, separate, isolate, intimidate, love on, and meet many other needs of the communicator, sometimes just self affirmation.

I think about this when I overhear Christian speak. Christians have their own language, slang, short cuts, logic, and Bible based understanding. It is beautiful when they are together and have the same Christian speak. However, it is painful when Christian speak is used with non believers.

I’ve heard witnessing persons ask a person if they were “saved.” That is a question that a Christian would understand because it carries a lot of logic and theology with the term. A non-Christian won’t understand that. They will probably understand a potential threat and that they have been made a target, but not understand the term.

Christians use scriptures to verify their thoughts which is great, except when they are doing so with a non believer who does not recognize or understand the Bible. Jesus told parables. He explained heavenly principles in the terms the common man could understand. He only used the Bible terminology with the Pharisees and Sadducees who were trained in their common faith. Jesus communicates with us in ways that we can understand. That is loving.

I am challenged to consider how I am communicating. Am I forcing others to understand me and my thinking processes, or am I trying to understand them so I can communicate clearly and thoughtfully? Am I stretching to understand and love them, or forcing them to stretch and understand me? The truth of Jesus and heaven can be told in any language, circumstance, culture, and career. Jesus proved that in the way He taught and shared.

Seeing the beauty of God everywhere and in everything is encouraging. That encouragement can and should be shared. We are called to witness, but not to alienate through thoughtless language and slang.

I once was invited to a ministry at a retirement home for military personnel. I was extremely concerned because I had never been in the military and didn’t know how to talk to them. I realized that all I had to do was listen. Jesus had been every place they had gone and with them through all they had experienced. All I had to do was listen, and I would be able to point the Lord out to them in their own life experience. It was not about me, my understanding, or my slang. It was about the creator of the universe who truly and deeply loves everyone.