Shannon Costello

I like language because it is so versatile, a fact I didn’t always appreciate. My adolescent mind couldn’t handle figurative meanings. But I see it now- there is so much more to what is said than the words by themselves should be able to convey. Interesting to think that even with that linguistic versatility God still has to simplify things a lot to get through to us at all.

In church last Sunday the pastor was arguing for a loving God based on verses in Matthew 10. God knows when the sparrows fall and how many hairs are on your head. People learn details like that because they are interested; they care about them. Therefore, God cares about you.

That argument, though reasonable, doesn’t always work for me because of books like 1984 or, to bring it a little closer to home, some of the more brutal aspects of South American history. Operation Condor is the name for the intelligence sharing in the 1970’s between a half dozen South American nations (including Bolivia) for the purpose of rooting out left-wing enemies. People disappeared, were tortured, killed, thrown from planes, abducted…the authorities didn’t care for their people, but they certainly tried to know a lot about them.

A few weeks ago I found a dead baby bird in our driveway. It was small and naked. It’s head was too big for its body and its beak was too big for its head. I turned it with a stick and it was floppy. I was sad to see it there and sad for the parents and the grief they experienced. Can a small bird feel grief? At least a sense of wrongness. That bird should have been begging in a nest and instead it was dead on the ground for some senseless reason.

This brings me back to language. God’s talk about birds is imbued with caring. He knows there is a wrongness there when a sparrow falls to the ground, even though the passage doesn’t specifically say that. A better example might be where God talks about gathering his people to himself like a hen gathers her chicks. That sort of language speaks caring without ever having to use the words.