what's in a word

I thought I had posted on this topic earlier but I cannot find any posts on the topic in my searches of the blog, so here it is (possibly again).

One of my friends in high school frequented the youth events for a church that neither of us attended. As a result I sometimes went along as well, but not very frequently. One night we were riding in the church van on the way back from an event, I think it was bowling, when the guy sitting next to me mentioned that he wanted to kill himself. I don't remember how we got on that topic, but my impression of the little that I knew about him led me to believe that he was partially serious, but that the main point was to find a reason not to do something so permanent. It could be that he was just pulling everyone's leg, but I have to say that he did not seem the joking type.

There is something weird that happens when you are around someone who you believe might actually be intending to kill himself or herself. Everything all of a sudden becomes about that one person and there is an edginess that everyone gets because they don't want to say or do something they would regret and be responsible for someone doing something so drastic. As would be expected, at least a few of the people in the bus felt that it was important to quickly convince him that life is worth living. This is when two of the girls in the bus started telling him that God loved him. Honestly, it sounded cliche and I think (and I thought at the time) that that was the last thing that he wanted to hear and that it was the last thing that would stop him from doing anything rash. I can't remember what specifically I said to him and I don't know that it was any better, but I remember his disappointed expression at people resorting to, "God loves you," as if he had never heard it before.

I don't know what happened with that guy. As I said, I didn't attend that church and he apparently rarely did either. I knew his name at the time, but I forgot it soon afterwards as I am apt to do. I have often thought back to that conversation, though. Had I been given the chance to do it over again I probably would have gotten his contact information and tried to give him more opportunity to describe what was so crappy about his life. I also have thought about how much a shame it is that, "God loves you," and the similar phrase, "God is love," are so cliched that when I hear it I don't think about what that really truly means.

There is probably no more important truth, as far as Christianity is concerned at least, than, "God is love." I think that so many people misunderstand the word love, though, that we interpret the phrase with a more superficial meaning or a just plain different meaning. I think that love in this context means a willingness to selflessly sacrifice. I think that it would be just as accurate to say, "God is sacrifice. He gave it and He demands it." This is backed up in Paul's letter to the Romans.

"Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."- Romans 5:7-8

John wrote the following on our responsibilities.

"This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome..."- 1 John 5:3

I can only speak for myself, but if I were cynical about how cliched the phrase, "God is love," is I would take it as a breath of fresh air for someone to tell me that God is sacrifice. It's specific. It's stark. It forces a decision as to whether I am going to accept that sort of a God or not. Most importantly, that God is sacrifice is more difficult to say with the pretense that what the listener is going through isn't such a big deal.

The reason I have been thinking about the topic of cliched words lately is that I have noticed, especially in my more recent classes, that a lot of the concepts behind the overused business buzzwords are actually quite good. I know this is a step down from talking about love and God, but it is still what got me thinking. Synergies are the abilities of groups within a company to work together in ways that their output is greater than the output of the groups individually, and they are vital for most mergers to make any rational sense. Paradigms are the mental constraints under which we think and they often disallow us from understanding the value of finding other better ways of doing what we do, and ignoring paradigm shifts usually results in the company in question going out of business. There are other cliched words that represent important concepts as well, but my point is already made. A few people at some point thought that using the buzzwords without giving the associated concepts the required respect to be effective and all we ultimately ended up with were Dilbert strips mocking synergies.

Since I don't think that anyone who reads this abuses religious or business buzzwords and cliches, this is probably written to the wrong audience. Perhaps this could be a word of warning lest anyone consider starting to use them without paying proper respect to the underlying concepts. Just say no.