Me: I learned a new word recently and I'm dying to use it!
Friend: Ooooo!! I'm really good at this sort of stuff! What's the word?
Me (excitedly; can hardly contain it): Concision. Isn't it just the greatest word EVER!! I love the way it just rolls off the tongue….. "concision." Say it! Doesn't it just sound so cool and intelligent? I love it! I want to write a post using it, or about it.
Friend: Well, don't make it a long one.
Silence while I give her a dirty look.
Friend: I'm just saying… prolixity* would not be appropriate in a post with such a title, don't you think?
More silence; continued glaring.
Friend: I'm just saying…
*Full disclosure: She actually used the word "verbosity," but I felt that was just too banal for the post, so I changed it (writer's prerogative) to a more grandiloquent word.
A woman in the crowd had suffered for twelve years with constant bleeding. She had suffered a great deal from many doctors, and over the years she had spent everything she had to pay them, but she had gotten no better. In fact, she had gotten worse. She had heard about Jesus, so she came up behind him through the crowd and touched his robe. For she thought to herself, “If I can just touch his robe, I will be healed.” Immediately the bleeding stopped, and she could feel in her body that she had been healed of her terrible condition.
Jesus realized at once that healing power had gone out from him, so he turned around in the crowd and asked,“Who touched my robe?”
His disciples said to him, “Look at this crowd pressing around you. How can you ask, ‘Who touched me?’”
But he kept on looking around to see who had done it.
Then the frightened woman, trembling at the realization of what had
happened to her, came and fell to her knees in front of him and told
him what she had done.
And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace. Your suffering is over.” — vs 25 – 34
There’s a saying: “act your way into feeling.” For the longest time I didn’t understand that phrase. I thought it encouraged deceit. Over the last year I’ve begun to truly apprehend what it means; I think I get it now.
I may not always feel forgiven; I may not always feel free from shame. But that doesn’t change the fact that I am. I touched the hem of His garment and I have been made whole. That is the Truth that God speaks. I am free. So in those times that the feeling isn’t there, when my emotions belie the Truth of who God says I am, I still need to act “as if” — as if I felt it, as if I am convinced in the depths of my soul it is True. Because the fact is, it is.
I can choose whose voice I listen to; I can choose what I will believe. I never knew that before this year. I don’t have to remain covered, buried, in the shame that has so enveloped me all my life just because I feel shame at this moment. I can choose to believe something different; choose to do something different.
So today I am. Right now I will. I will believe the Truth even though I don’t feel it. I will act my way into feeling.
These Nicole C. Mullins songs have been on my iPod since I got back
from Women of Faith last month. God used them to speak His love and infinite grace to me. They truly tell the story of my life; my shame-filled yet blessed-beyond-measure Life. And God continues to use them as reminders of the Truth of who I am in His eyes; and encourage me to keep acting my way into feeling. I thought I’d pass them along to you today, in case you need encouragement too.
At 1:21 p.m., applause and cheers echoed through the House chamber as the number of “aye” votes crossed the threshold needed for passage with just seconds remaining in the official 15-minute voting period. — NYTimes.com Oct 3, 2008