Eloquent Bleating

This post was originally published on my first blog, "Dad's Corner." It was moved to another site, lost, and found in my old files. This should be the only place you can find it.

As a writer, it’s always a battle to come up with just the right words to say and the order they go in. English is an incredibly bewildering language, and I won’t cover that topic here except to say that it is a mixture of Latin, French, northern European, Celtic, Welsh, and Saxon. Any language with that many contributors is bound to have more than a few quirks.

I imagine it was similar to Aramaic, the language of Jesus’ time, a hodge-podge of traders’ terms and native languages. Jesus must have found using the language one of the major challenges of life here. Here he was, creator of everything, coming from a perfect place where they spoke a perfect language that had a perfect word for everything. Then he comes down here. It must have felt like grunting to pigs or bleating to sheep. Sheep have one word for everything: Baa. Hungry? Baa. Thirsty? Baa. Coyote? Baa! All of it is one simple life of “baa.” So to us, sheep are simple creatures that don’t do much. Imagine being a sheep for a day. Step down inside that wooly coat and hang around with the other rams and ewes. Spend time chewing grass with them and moving about. And while you’re at it, teach them what it’s like being a human, the world of e-mail and the benefit of miles per gallon. All the while, you may only speak “baa,” because it’s all they understand.

That’s why, I’m thinking, Jesus spoke so often in parables. There are only so many things in a sheep’s life that a sheep understands. Maybe that’s why they get that bewildered look when they are first sheered. By putting things into parables, Jesus helped even the simple understand the difference between living with God and living without him.

Instead of stepping down into a sheep’s world, maybe it would be simpler if we just stepped down out of our realm of mortgages, monthly income, and oil changes and into the world of our sons and daughters. Sitting down with them and spending time is the best way to show your love to them. Enter the world of trucks and models, of dolls and hairbrushes. Look for ways to compare the things they know with the things of God. Given enough time, even if they don’t understand all you tell them, they will still know you care. Paul in Philippians 2 said,

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross! (NIV).