I Refuse To Be Content With Shorthand-Reality This Christmas

In front of me, there is a rectangle with rows of little squares on it. On each square a little symbol is emblazoned; bits of circles, lines, or a mash up of the two. Whenever I push on one of the squares, the symbol transfers to my screen, and I call this “writing”. Even more amazing is the fact that you can read it, because we’ve agreed by consensus with our forefathers that these funny little shapes on my keyboard correspond to real sounds, and that the sounds can be mixed together to make words, and that the words can serve as a shorthand way of communicating about real things, real concepts, and real people.

The words themselves are not the reality. They are only a crude substitution for the purposes of communication. It would be tricky, after all, to have to hold up a real tree anytime we wanted to talk about one, or a real lion, for that matter. And intangible things like love and mathematics could hardly be spoken of at all without our language of squiggles and sounds standing in for them. For the most part, having a shorthand system to use for talking about reality is a great advantage. But there is a downside to it as well, coming from the fact that words can only mean as much as we already know. For example, if I write my own name:

Seth Lewis

The words by themselves mean nothing unless you already know something about the living, breathing human who goes by that name and is writing these squiggly shapes for you to read. Even with shorthand, there’s no getting around the fact that it takes time to learn the meaning of most realities, and especially so for personalities. This is why novels must devote so many pages to character development – we need descriptions, thought processes, conversations, and reactions to various situations before we can even begin to build a realistic idea of what shorthand words like “Seth Lewis” actually mean in the reality of living flesh.

It should be no surprise to us, then, that the same is true of the word “God”. By itself, it is a funny-looking set of circling squiggle-lines.

But what is the reality behind it?

It’s popular these days to say that the reality behind “God” is whatever we personally desire: Whether I want a cosmic Mother Nature, a mindless Force, or a Holy Father, I can fill that word however I like, and live my life accordingly. The problem with this idea is that if there is any such real being as God, my personal desires won’t be likely to change his fundamental realities. If some strangers online become firmly convinced that they have the truth about what a Seth Lewis really is, how a Seth Lewis really acts, and how I really think, it still won’t change the actual reality of what I am. In the same way, if we want to know the reality of God, we’ll need something better than our gut feelings and natural preferences to tell us.

Thankfully, we have something better: words from God himself, describing to us in detail how he acts, thinks, converses, and works in various situations. Even more than that, we have the historic appearance of God himself in human flesh – the reason we celebrate Christmas this month – to translate himself into our reality. This means that we can now see how this God thinks, converses, acts, and responds to the various situations of life on earth, as a human. This Christmas season, I don’t want to be content with my current understanding of the old familiar shorthand: God, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, shepherds, wise men, and such. I want to take time instead to mine the gospel accounts carefully and get to know more about the reality those shorthand words represent. More about the Reality that made himself an infant, brought heaven to earth, and reshaped eternity. More about the Reality that has already changed my own reality more than anything or anyone else. I already know the shorthand. I want to know more of Him.