One of our deacons told me a humorous story of when he worked at the grain elevator. It seems that they hired a young girl to do some secretarial work. The girl didn’t really do a good job and after a bit of time she left, but her poor work followed her. In the next few months, any wrong invoice or misfiled paperwork was blamed on her. The only problem was even after she had been gone a year mistakes from 6 months ago were still blamed on her. Even when it couldn’t have been her mistake, she was still too easy to blame. I think a lot of church problems get “solved” the same way. Instead of looking for how we can work to improve, we have some time tested excuse that is just too easy to use. Excuses and blame never solve anything. Next time we are faced with challenges, let’s not seek to lay blame, but find solutions instead.
Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...
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