Communication

Words: What We Say to Others and Ourselves Forms our World

/ Joshua Thomas / Leave a comment

“Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.”

Proverbs 18:21 CSB

“No foul language should come from your mouth, but only what is good for building up someone in need, so that it gives grace to those who hear.”

Ephesians 4:29 CSB

“If anyone thinks he is religious without controlling his tongue, his religion is useless and he deceives himself.”

James 1:26 CSB

I love playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. We get together and play every week, and while we love playing, we really love being able to spend time together. Part of the game involves magic, and there is a spell that I think is really cool. There’s a spell called “Wither and Bloom” that allows you to attack an enemy and at the same time heal an ally. It’s a lot of fun in flavor with your character, but it stands out to me as a good visual representation of the power we hold with our words.

I’m sure over the course of your life, there have been moments that have stuck with you over time. Some may be words of encouragement or empowerment, where someone saw something in you that you never fully realized yourself. Some may ben words that have hurt you, cut to your heart, and as much as you try to forget, they have stuck with you. Words have power, and what we speak over one another can either heal or harm. The same is true with your own internal voice.

In a world where words are used far more frequently to harm others, use your words to heal those around you.

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Love & Family

/ Joshua Thomas / Leave a comment

This week marks my last week as a full time college student. Pretty weird but exciting at the same time. For one thing it marks a new start, a chance for me to get out of the mundane and into my passions. On the other hand it brings unknowns and uncertainties about the future. It’s all exciting and nerve wracking, but I can’t wait to see where God takes me. I’ve learned so much over the past four years during my time at university, but there was a moment about two weeks ago that taught me immensely about two things, love and family. I’ve written about these two things several times before, but I am taking a non-traditional approach to what it means to have family and what it means to love people. I want to talk about them because I feel like in our culture today, especially in a Christian spiritual culture today, we tend to see our family as just the people we serve alongside in ministry or flesh and blood. We also use love as a bargaining chip, saying if you do “x,” then I will give you love. That’s not what we are called to do, and today I want to talk about a moment that was a turning point in the life of someone I experienced not long ago.

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Counter Culture

/ Joshua Thomas / Leave a comment

Culture is all around us. We are exposed to each of our cultures on a daily basis; the messages and ideas are thrown at us constantly, and we don’t even pick up on all of it. It’s so ingrained in each of us that these messages don’t even phase us anymore, things become normal. In our normalcy we become numb. I bring up this idea of culture because I study culture at my university. I am a communication studies major (not communications, you’d lose a hand if you said that to any of the professors), and in this field I am able to look at how messages are communicated to each other, and culture comes from this communication. A culture is a way of life of a group of people–the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication. Culture influences us, culture changes the way we think and culture has us accept things that they are normal, but we are weird. When you become weird, you can never go back to being normal.

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