Episode 299: I’m Talkin. . .Words

I’m talking episode 299 for January 7th, 2024.

This is Joel from the I’m talking microcast, where I share my thoughts on a topic that has piqued my interest this past week.

This week, we’re talking words.

As we head into a new year, it seems appropriate for my first microcast of the year to be the word words, because that’s what I’ve done for the last 298 episodes.

I think I’m into my fifth year, that means, or closing in on six, but either way, obviously words are important to me.

If you spend any time listening, you can understand why that is, as I challenge us every week to use words appropriately and to have the meaning of the word shape our lives.

This year, I’m not really, well, not really.

This year, I’m not doing a theme.

I haven’t come up with a theme to follow through where every letter is a word for the week.

What I’m doing instead is coming up with groups of words, and the first group of words I’ll explain in a little bit, but one thing that happens with words is they can be tossed around as unimportant.

Sometimes we say things, and we end up saying, well, that’s not really what I meant, and we don’t use the words that we’d like to use, and then we think, why did we say that, or why did we not say that, and we must realize the importance of words, and therein lies the challenge for those of us who call ourselves Christians.

I don’t think, as Christians, words have any more particular meaning to us than the rest of the world, but we do have a responsibility to use words carefully, to understand the weight that words carry, to recognize that what we say is important, and how we say it is important, and the words that we use are important, and sometimes, as Christians, we have sets of words that the rest of the world just doesn’t use ever, and when I was little, and then even into my teen years, we called those church words, and when I was in Sunday school classes, I can remember teachers going, well, that’s the churchy answer, or whatever, but there are words in our language that are only used at church, and they can be confusing to the rest of the world, so our challenge over the next weeks is going to be looking at those church words, and figuring out if we should use them in the real world, and when we do, how do we use them appropriately, and how do we explain to people what it means to use those words, and that they really only carry meaning as a Christian, and so we will be looking at that, the weight of words, how we say it, when we say it, how we define them, and therein lies the challenge that we will face in the first few number of weeks in 2024.

At the moment, I think I might have 10 to 12 words, so it’ll last for a number of months, and I look forward to challenging all of us to use words appropriately, to define them appropriately, and to have the opportunity to share such words with our non-christian friends, and we will see how that goes.

I usually don’t give the opportunity for this, but if you would like to reach out and offer up church words that I may not have thought of, you can reach me at Joel.Marig at MarigFamily.com, and that’s M-E-A-R-I-G, that’s how you spell Marig.

I look forward to hearing from you, and look forward to another year of insightful, challenging, special words of my microcast.

Until next week, this is Joel from the I’m Talking Microcast.