Aside from being a good place to babble, waste time, and journal, this blog might also be a good way to keep my vocabulary up. Teaching English, I have realized (through the help of a friend, who, upon reading my last mass email, informed me that basically the only adjective I used was the word 'nice'), can severely limit your vocabulary. Half of my classes I am teaching kindergarten children who have only been learning English since last March. Considering this fact it is remarkable how much they have learned. Still, as much as they know, they don't know words like 'great', 'spectacular', 'stupendous', 'excellent', 'terrible', 'horrible', and so on. They know 'nice', 'good', 'bad', and maybe a few more. Learning the multiple similar meaning adjectives in English might be 'nice' but its just not as important as learning so many other things. Also, though they have learned a lot, they have still only been learning since last March.
A Pastor's Word: Silence
Silence. I think of the servant watching Rebekah intently, waiting to see if his mission is a success. I think of the darkness of the ninth plague; I wonder if there was silence. I think of the Canaanite woman crying for help and Jesus not saying a word. I think of the disciples in the storm as they find that Jesus is asleep. Were they speechless? I think of Jesus in the Garden, his friends all asleep, his prayers rising as his sweat falls. Or the three hours of darkness while Jesus hung on the cross. Was there silence then? I think of the silences I have experienced. The brief pause, the in-drawn breathe, that stretches into an imaginary eternity, when I asked the woman I love to marry me and she had yet to answer. That moment of silence before our baby cried for the first time. The first rays of sun hitting the side of the mountain, when I realized I couldn't hear the highway anymore. The pause in the wind...
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