The tone of my last post about the guy who put forward and argument based on a shallow interpretation of Scripture was pretty sharp. I tried to separate out my dislike of the interpretation from any possible personal dislike. I don’t know that I succeeded. Perhaps I was snarky in a couple of comments.
Sometimes we just come out and call things by names that were poorly chosen.
Christians sometimes have a way of moving a conversation to the personal perhaps a little too quickly. Maybe making a judgement about saved or not saved based on superficial information. Or even no information.
Sometimes in analyzing we place a label on people that we shouldn’t. It could be wrong. It could be right. But it changes the entire discourse usually away from the direction we wished we were going.
How about when we name something and people get an entirely different interpretation of our event or program than what we meant. Now, we cannot recover or recover only with great difficulty.
Ad hominem attacks, such as we often see in politics, never move a discussion forward. Attacking a person instead of discussing her ideas and trying to understand and empathize is just the easy way out. And it will never lead to reconciliation and relationship.
Those of us who use words must especially be careful. Paul says those who teach are especially at risk if we don’t teach correctly. Let us strive to use words correctly and intelligently.
Tags: actions, attitude, awareness, compassion, speaking, words
Faith Venture 
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