I ran across a passage in Scripture today that I think illustrates the two-sidedness of effective communication quite well:
"If a man loudly blesses his neighbor early in the morning,
it will be taken as a curse."
(Proverbs 27:14)
In other words, communication, for better or for worse, has two parts: (1) What I Say, and (2) What You Hear. A well-meaning Christian filmmaker (to bring the lesson home) may make a film in which he has poured everything he knows about the Gospel in an attempt to convey God's "I love you!" to the world, but, if what the world hears is "I hate you!", then our man's communication has failed, and he must try again.
This is where the problem comes in: It does not seem that Christians are especially willing to start again. If the track record of the Christian Music industry is any indication of the state of Christianity in general, then we can assume that when communication breaks down, the well-meaning artists will blame it on either persecution or the world's spiritual blindness. As concerns the first...
blah blah blah...
Who wrote all this? And what's he doing about it? Is HE making any effort to start over? I wish he stop talking so much and just start DOING something.
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1 comment:
Well, I think you're right. It's like someone walking up to you and introducing themselves, over and over and over again.
I went to a songwriting session in CCM (gasp!) world, about a year ago. During the session, the writer/critic was pummelling some guy who had reverted to all the old cliches we all know, and even worse, put them to a old-school baptist sing song (not that there's anything inherantly wrong with baptist singy songy songs; you've just got to know how to write them!) style.
This writer railed on the fact that if God is so enormous and fabulous, why weren't we as writers looking to mine into that field of spiritual oil, and try to describe God and understand him, and life in general in a new ways. I found it interesting, and I find your post to be a culmination of that idea.
But yeah, I also wake up in the morning and ask myself, "what the heck am I doing?"
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