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Real Answers™
dl134
Copyright: © 2008 Donald E. Lindman
600 words

PAST TREASURES STILL TEACH TODAY

By: Don Lindman

Each year that passes into the history books leaves us with memories.  The older we get, the greater the collection—the record of our investment in the present and the future.

Our 10-year old granddaughter recently discovered Grandma and Grandpa’s attic.  It’s largely a collection of stuff we should have thrown out years ago, but to her it was a treasure.  Our history is stored up there.  We don’t need it that much, because we lived it and have banked it.  She does need it, because she wasn’t there at the time.

“History is a special announcement for the benefit of those who came in late,” said Christian Century columnist Halford Luccock.  To our granddaughter, that is particularly true.

Joanne and I have also found some interesting things in our granddaughter’s diggings.  She found some old early elementary school material of mine.  The spelling wasn’t all that great, which my wife found surprising since I’m a pretty good speller today.  But the penmanship was excellent!

Penmanship.  Now, there’s a word we don’t see much today.  I watch young people holding pens and pencils in awkward positions as they write.  When the writing is legible, it isn’t very pretty.  Much of the time it really isn’t legible, except perhaps to the writer.

My generation wrote clearly and legibly, and many still do today.  We spent hours and hours doing writing “exercises”: continuing spirals from one end to the other on line after line of ruled paper; teardrop after teardrop of below-the-line parts of “p’s” and “y’s”, “q’s” and “g’s.”

Those who went on to become doctors had to unlearn all of this, but the rest of us had little problem communicating through writing.

Of course, today people don’t write as much as they used to.  Thanks to computers—desktop, laptop, and hand-held—we now type a lot of our communication.  But there still are times when we need to write, and we frequently don’t do it very well.

Computers not only have pushed penmanship into the past, they also are making a shambles of  spelling.  Why worry about how to spell “laugh” (“laff?”) when you can simply say “LOL” (“laughing out loud). 

And who needs to say, “I’m smiling (smyling? smieling?) when you can type a colon followed by an end parenthesis :) ?  (My computer automatically turns the combination into a smiley-face.)

Words are still our most common and most accurate means of communicating.  We convey them by writing as well as by speaking; we do it by long-hand as well as by word processing; but ultimately the memories in our mind’s data bank need words to be communicated from one person to another.

Even God communicated to us via words.  Jesus, whom Christians believe is God’s clearest transmission of his attributes and actions, is called “the word of God.”  While the Greek word involved can be translated a number of ways, one of the most prominent is “word.” 

He is God’s “word” to us.  And God’s “penmanship” and “spelling” are clear.   

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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