Meditations 1

A Divine Twist in the Tail

When I was first in Romania and didn't know the language so well, I visited a shop to get some food supplies. At the entrance to the shop, I took a basket and a loaf of bread from the counter there and then went round and filled up the basket with a handful of other items. Finally, I approached the checkout to pay for everything that I had taken. However, the lady there started to get agitated and tried to communicate something to me. Not knowing Romanian very well at this stage, I couldn't quite work out what she was trying to say. In order to try and resolve the problem, the lady began to say what she was saying louder as if somehow that would make me understand. I didn't know what to do. The only Romanian phrase that I could think to use was, 'Eu nu înțeleg' (I don't understand), not particularly helpful as it was patently obvious that I didn't understand! Eventually, the lady started to point towards the entrance to the shop. As I gazed over, I realised that besides the counter where I had taken the bread, there was another lady who was taking payment for these bakery products. Suddenly then, it dawned on me the reason for the agitation; the fact that I hadn't paid for the bread in the right place. Quickly, I grabbed the loaf, hurried over and paid for it and then return to pay at the checkout for the other items. This action calmed the lady at the til down and enabled me to finally leave the shop and go and enjoy the spoils of my first lone foray into a Romanian supermarket.

Origin of Communication Problems
In life, we are often confronted with communication problems. In particular, when we spend time in a foreign country, but even in our own country, we can sometimes not even understand people who are speaking the same language as us. If we read the Bible, we can actually discover the origin of all these interpersonal misunderstandings. In Genesis 11:1-9, we find the story of the tower of Babel. The first verse tells us that originally everybody spoke the same language. As time went by people decided to build a city for themselves with a tower reaching up to the heavens. Nothing wrong with that, you might think, but actually, if we read chapter 9 verses one and seven, we see that God's command for people was that they should spread out and fill the Earth. People, however, decided that that sounded like hard work and began to build a nice comfy city for themselves. Moreso, Genesis 11:4 tells us that a secondary aim of theirs was that others would see the city and tower that they had built and as a result revere their name. Overall then, these first people were not obeying God's plan for them to fill the Earth, neither were they seeking to glorify God.

God's Solution
God's solution to this situation was to come down from heaven and confuse their languages. It's hard to imagine how this happened. Maybe, there was a lightning bolt and all of a sudden people started speaking differently or alternatively, maybe overnight things changed, so that in the morning when everyone woke up, Hebrew, Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic and the like were to be heard emanating from people's tongues. In any case, once people couldn't understand, there was the same effect as today. Moments like the personal one I mentioned above, became commonplace and the resulting tensions and misunderstandings led to an end to construction on the city and tower, and instead people spreading out over the Earth thus fulfilling God's original plan. An interesting side effect of this was the creation of cultural and linguistic diversity. If it hadn't been for Babel, people would have fulfilled the Earth, but having the same language and culture. Today's world is so much more interesting and beautiful due to all the different cultures that exist so we can see that God's intervention not only ensures that His plans are fulfilled, but also the eventual outcome is so much better than it would have been otherwise.

Conclusion
A lesson that we can learn from this is that often the confusing and twisted situations that occur in life are God's way of fulfilling and bringing about His plans for us. We may have lots of plans and ideas for our lives, many of which seem like good things (after all, in essence as already mentioned, there's nothing wrong with wanting to build a nice city!), but God's plans are best and sometimes He can use mysterious and hard to understand ways to bring them about. Our part is, come what may, to simply keep on trusting and following Him.