The Power of Words

What I learned in class on Wednesday about symbols and meanings happened to come up right away. It happened during institute. I heard a word the instructor said and I instantly put a different meaning to that word than the instructor had. She said, "God was criticizing them." I would have said in that context that "God was chastening them" Criticize has a very negative connotation in my mind. I do not feel that God would ever criticize his children. To me that would mean he was belittling or demeaning them. However, in my mind for that context it would have been completely appropriate to have said that He was chastening them. I honestly wonder if she realized she said that word. Maybe she didn't mean to. Either way though I realized that one word, or symbol, can have two different meanings. I feel that we more easily see these differences when looking at other cultures. We are quicker to try to understand why someone would have said something the way they did because we realize they do not come from the same background as us. I think we fail to realize that in our own culture, due to smaller cultures within our culture, we sometimes have different meanings for a word than someone else. Unfortunately, we as a whole are not usually aware of this and I feel many misinterpretations can arise because of this. If only we were less quick to judge and more willing to look at the situation from different angles, at least trying to see things from the angle of the person with whom we are confronting. I am one to judge way too quickly. I try to find and understand the patterns of people I meet so that I can place them. It really is true what we were discussing in class. We try to make sense of people as fast as possible because then we can relate to them, understand them, etc. It is sad to me though that in the process we can sometimes misplace them or not come to understand who they truly are. In class on Monday Matt had me remember a situation from my mission. I then had about 5 min. to write down adjectives to describe that memory. We talked about descriptive and evaluative words. Descriptive words describe physical attributes I can see and things as they are. Evaluative words are words where I had placed values or meaning to those descriptive words. For example I used the adjective "happy." This word was used to describe one of my favorite investigators, but the smile on her face (the descriptive thing I saw) led me to that adjective because of a meaning I place to that smile. Since then I have been looking at situations and paying attention to my feelings. I think, "What descriptive things am I seeing?" as well as, "What evaluative things am I assuming?" I love how analyzing this situation connects to patterns or categories. In these situations as I make the descriptive and evaluative conclusions I am forming patterns that are making people or situations. I am now trying to pay attention to these observations so that I correctly place these things. I hope that I do not get stuck on the same train tracks. I need to learn now to identify my train tracks and realize that I might need to come from a new angle if I'm going to come to a correct understanding of that person or situation. I need to start thinking this way now so that when I’m in the field trying to come to an understanding of my inquiry that I can see it from the tracks and angles they have in their culture. If I come from my tracks and pattern making habits I will most likely come to wrong conclusions.