Three year old Skylar lives in a country-like neighborhood with lots of natural wildlife, including a flock of crows. Sometimes they swoop around in a group or congregate in one tree. When that happens Skylar says, “Today they’re having a meeting.”
Recently a crow flew overhead with a “Caw! Caw!”
“Wow!” I said. “Did you see that giant black bird?”
“That’s a macaw,” she said.
“Really?” I said, watching the crow disappear over the trees. “I thought macaws had bright colors.”
“No. They’re black.”
Then she said, “And I speak their language.”
“Impressive,” I said. “How’d you learn that?”
“Oh, I always knew it,” she said. “Actually, I taught it to the macaws.”
Learning languages is tricky. Teaching them is more so. Most of us have struggled to learn the ins and outs of a foreign language during school years, from Latin to French to Spanish and beyond. Biblical scholars work at Hebrew and Greek, and toddlers work to be understood by anyone.
Gary Chapman wrote THE 5 LOVE LANGUAGES, explaining how to communicate best with those we love most. Not only do different generations speak differently, different decades do, too. But that’s not all. There are male-female variations and personality-type distinctions. It’s almost too complicated to figure out, so why bother?
We bother because of love.
When we love someone, we want to understand them better, including foreigners. Despite not understanding at first, it’s good to keep trying. God, the Great Communicator, is hoping we will. His desire is that we all become members of his family, and part of having harmonious relationships is communicating effectively. If we can’t understand each other, we are, in a way, foreigners living together in frustration. The Lord wants us all to “click,” and like all good fathers, he’s hoping his children will get to the place of communicating blessing to each other.
He also wants us to come to him for conversation. The biblical David put it well: “My heart has heard you say, “Come and talk with me.” And my heart responds, “Lord, I am coming.” (Psalm 27:8) I’ll never get over the fact that God Almighty has an interest in our communication with each other, and even personally, him with me. My longing is to talk to others and to him in a way that will please him, and to accurately understand his language back to me.
And so I’ll keep trying.
I’m also trying to communicate with the crow-macaws as well as Skylar does. Yesterday we were playing in her driveway when she said, “I can ride my bike as fast as the birds fly. And when I yell up to ’em in bird language, they fly where I tell ’em to go.”
Flawless communication, to be sure.
”There are many different languages in the world, and every language has meaning. But if I don’t understand a language, I will be a foreigner to someone who speaks it, and the one who speaks it will be a foreigner to me.” (1 Corinthians 14:10-11)
