The Word with Friends

Have you heard about this game called Word with Friends? You can play this thing on your Android or your I-Pod, Pad, smart or dumb phone. A Texas-based company called Newtoy, founded in 2008 by brothers Paul and David Bedttner, developed the Games with Friends franchise, including Chess and Words with Friends. They sold the whole thing in 2010 to Zynga. They then launched Hanging With Friends, Words with Friends on Facebook and such.

Words are, as one can imagine, powerful things. Just ask Alec Baldwin, who was famously playing Words With Friends while seated on an airplane that was resting on the tarmac before takeoff. Asked to stop playing, Baldwin, uh, said some words that got him toss from the plane.

Let's look at some Words with Friends that are more powerful than even those.

"In the beginning," John's wonderful Gospel begins, "was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

This man, this writer, this John (as far as is really known) was a fisherman. Yet...

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

I'm constantly reminding, or at least it seems like it is constant, people I come into contact with that the gentle but insistent teaching of the Holy Spirit is every bit as important, every bit as beneficial as any seminary in the world. Some of that is self-serving, of course, since I've not been to seminary nor am I ever going, so therefore it would be in my own interest to say something that would eliminate the need for seminary.

Still, I believe at my core that there is more than a seminary-education to all this.

In the beginning was the Word, not Perkins. That incredibly deep theological statement was written by a fisherman. What a line in the water...

What else can we find trolling in the water here?

"The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."

The Word...
became ...
flesh.

The Word, which existed, lived with, lived as God ...
became flesh, us, one of many, common but uncommon ...

The Word, who was God, became Jesus, who was human.

Now, nothing against someone whose job it is to bait hooks, throw them into the deep, murky waters of the Sea of Galilee or whose job it was to toss large, heavy nets over the side of a relatively small boat and let the God of Fate decide whether fish would be taken from those same waters. Nothing against any of them, who were born into the battle of the sea and knew nothing else. Some of the descendants of those fishermen still live on the shores of the Sea or Lake of Galilee outside of Tiberius in Israel, or they fish the Mediterranean with GPS tracking and such. They're fiercely independent workers, without union or back-up if their boat springs leaks or such.

But they do not, as a rule, write "In the beginning, was the Word," or "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us."

Not saying they couldn't, but, uh, saying it's not likely. I've been writing for some sort of publication since I was 14 years of age. I've been gifted, small or large, with that ability without some benefit of schooling. God is the lone agent of inspiration, as near as I can discover. I'm not self-taught, but it's something akin to that.

I have tons of experience. I've written nearly every day of what is becoming a long life.

And there is no "In the beginning, was the Word," found anywhere in my scribbles. There just isn't.

The point of all this is, God takes care of his own. He makes sure we read, hear, discuss what we need to read, hear, discuss. God spoke, I believe, through this simple fisherman every bit as much as He did through John Wesley, through Calvin, through Augustine, through Luther, through Paul and certainly through the apostle John.

Looking for a miracle? A fisherman whose descriptive powers are marvelous, whose theological understanding of the most complex ideas such as Jesus being fully God as well as fully human is as big as Red Sea parting to me.

Hey, John must have played a lot of  Words with Friends, classic edition.