Profanity

I read www.aholyexperience.com by Ann Voskamp. It's a blog full of beautiful insight and she is a rather famous author of a very poignant and poetic book that I'm not smart enough to read, but the blog is little chunks of wisdom that I can usually digest. Today she posted a quote by Elisabeth Elliot that said "profanity is failure to see the inner mystery". Huh? Thank goodness Ann explained that inner mystery, in this case, means holiness. So foul language is a failure to recognize holiness. I still didn't get it. I read it at 6am this morning and it's now 1:25pm and I GET IT!

I knew this was speaking directly to me because I have been feeling very convicted about my bad habit of using curse words freely and with no filter. I usually stay away from the F word unless I'm really mad, but I even use profanity in daily talk with my kids when things get tense. Some of you gasp, I know.

So I have been thinking about it all day and it just hit me and I had to start typing before my thoughts escaped or some evil spirit buries them in my laundry pile that I never see the bottom of.

Using bad language....and not just curse words, but wicked-talk via tone or vocabulary means that I am not seeing myself as a vessel of God. I am not seeing my poor subjects, to whom I wickedly speak, as God-breathed beings. When I curse at nobody but the corner of a table for the stubbed toe, I am failing to remember that Christ is with me. That He walked this earth because of Christmas day and it is therefore Holy. It is ALL HOLY. Every moment of repetitive refinement, every purification by child-induced fire or cash poor cross carrying bad day.....it is all Holy because He is at work in it. All of life flames with God and I am missing it with my "me" eyes.

So here goes my NO CUSSIN' commitment. If you hear me say it, rebuke me. If I type it, stop reading this blog and spend your time with someone who gets how sacred it all is.

That's all. Thanks for your support.