Frank and Grace

Living in a new house has brought its share of pleasant surprises. One (admittedly very minor) one for us has been having a garbage disposal in the sink. For a while we had been calling it the "sink monster" but the girls decided that the sink monster needed a name - so, our disposal is named Frank (sorry if you're reading this and your name is Frank - if it's any consolation, they named Lori's car "shiny lunch"...)

Naming the disposal has made for some interesting conversations at our house:

"Do you want the rest of this corn?"
"Nah. Frank it."

"Hey, I'm going to Frank this banana, it's pretty brown..."

And so on. Yep, Frank is a verb in our house now. Got something unidentifiable in the back of the 'fridge? Frank it. A scoop of mashed potatoes left from dinner. Frank it.

And we have other "code" words at home, too. If you know us well, you know about roses...and there are other words and phrases that are uniquely "Beatty-ese."

So, sometimes it takes a little while to come up to speed with Beatty-ese.

And, in the church, we do that. We have code words or buzz words or...well, insider language.

Yesterday morning and last night I talked about grace and transformation. I'm not sure whether I did either justice, but I thought (mid-sermon, no less) that I might not be clear enough for the "non-initiated" in Christian-ese. So, I did my best...

But there's a balance that we kind of need to strike between embracing and living out these deep theological concepts (atonement, grace, sanctification, etc.) and realizing that the WORDS of these concepts can be unbelievably unfathomable to some - even to some who have been in church for some years. In technical terms, they're JARGON - specialized words used by a particular group. And, with jargon, you're either in or your out.

I know a little about computers, so I can have a conversation (like I did yesterday) with someone about trying to rescue a harddrive - talking about BIOS and DOS booting and...well, Lori's eyes just glaze over and she goes and checks on the girls. You're either in or your out. But Lori understands that I'm trying to access this harddrive and I have to make sure the computer is SET UP properly to read the drive and that I might have to access the computer in a very BASIC or SIMPLIFIED way (okay, that may be over stretching DOS booting...but you get the idea...um, if you're IN, that is...)

And, truth be told, I've been doing this computer thing half my life and I still only know a tiny bit about it - so a lot of the jargon goes over my head, too...

Heh, and if things keep up the way they are, I'm gonig Frank the harddrive that I'm trying to rescue...





*yep, another morguefile image - edited slightly with another favorite (free) gimpshop...