Whole Means Healthy Means Connecting Words with Things

"Among the multitude of scholars and authors we feel no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than of inspiration; they have a light and know not whence it comes and call it their own: their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown member, so that their strength is a disease." I start with this quote because this blog is intended to speak about being healthy and part of that is the importance of things and not just words.

My other blog intends to discuss a skill in words. Yet a knack and skill in words alone carries the danger spoken of above, if it is exaggerated. The author of the above quote also wrote: "... answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after." The author also wrote: "No answer in words can reply to a question of things."

The balance that I want to achieve is that of a healthy relationship between things and words. I want to be derogatory toward neither, except when one truly becomes over-developed at the expense of the other. One of my professors in college points out this distinction another way. He calls it the difference between a knower and a teacher or the difference between a learner and a student. The former is concerned with things, the latter with words. Both are needed together in a healthy educational atmosphere.

What has really driven me to write about being whole and healthy are the real world need for each. Look around you at the people you know. Do not many people need to be whole and healthy? Isn't healthy also a buzz word in our time? Yet what is the thing called healthy? Or what is the thing called whole?

Alongside of stumbling upon the word holy meaning whole, I was stumbling through life in need of being whole. I was not a holy person, because I was not aware that a holy person was a whole person. The words I heard took me away from being healthy to "some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown member." Whether the topic was humility or love or some other, they each in succession pulled me away from the reality of being a whole person, because the community and communication exaggerated one part in place of the whole.

This is where the skill of words becomes important. Words are carriers of things between people and from God to us and us to God. It is much like money which takes the place of the goods. Words are the carriers of things from one person to another, much like people can exchange goods through the exchange of money. Yet the money ultimately is concerned about the goods and about the tremendous advantage that money offers over a world where there is only the goods.

Likewise words themselves are about things and about the tremendous advantage we have, because we have the faculty to communicate by words. I think we have a great yearning in our day for being whole and for being healthy. I think quite a few of the broken want to be healed. I think a few want to stop that healing for others and I think a few of the broken enjoy the excuses they can make from their brokenness. I also think many healthy people can discern something whole and something broken.

What is missing is God's communication on this subject, because the thing called words are in disrepute. They aren't regarded like money. People too often exaggerate the power of money and dismiss the power of words. If God meant to communicate that a holy person is a whole person and therefore a healthy person, then we are missing out because I don't get that thing called healthy, when I exchange my words with another person. This is because the message we are receiving or the money we are getting says that the thing we can exchange our words for is not a whole thing, but a separated thing.

The problem is that the thing we are receiving for our words is not what we need. Unfortunately, while money can be spent on a diversity of things, if you have enough; words can only be exchanged for the thing they are agreed to refer to in the language we speak to one another. So back to my earlier quote: "Among the multitude of scholars and authors we feel no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than of inspiration ...." Inspiration comes not from words, but from things. Are you sure when we read your Bible, you are getting the thing God intended and that you needed or has someone swapped the goods on you? May God bless you with discernment.



In Christ,



Jon