Without Jesus, I'm Fucked

Do you figure He'll damn me for saying that?

I've never been to a church where the church-going folks didn't use a hilarious list of childish euphemisms for every bad word. I mean, I know that at some point, certain words in the English language were defined as "good", and "good" words are appropriate for a certain class of society, and certain other words are "bad", and "bad" words are never appropriate for that class. Church-going folk like to think they're high class, so we're taught not to use the "bad" words.

I believe, contrary to our postmodern culture, that words have specific meanings. A word has a list of meanings, these can be found in a dictionary. These meanings are well-defined, but do not in and of themselves carry a moral value. We string words together into sentences, these sentences combine the meanings of the individual words to form a statement. This statement contains the message of the speaker, and that message may contain a moral value.

So, for example, if I tell someone to "fuck off", it's not that the word "fuck" is bad, nor that the sentence "Fuck off." is inherently evil, but that my desire for them to "fuck off" is. Angrily telling them to jump off a cliff or into a lake would have very similar meaning, but to the high society folks, wouldn't carry the "bad" moral value attached to the word "fuck."

Now, back in a Bible college I got thrown out of, I heard a lot of kids talk about things that were "frikkin' cool!" or "jacked up", and sometimes I heard them say something was "bullcrap." I even once heard a kid say, in shock, to "Shut the front door" in response to whatever he'd heard.

I've read the Bible, I don't remember it saying that God doesn't see right through euphemisms. In fact, I remember it saying that God not only knows what's in our hearts, He judges us based on them.

At what point do we think avoiding the Seven Words We Can't Say On TV will trick God?

Back to the title of this post, it's how I talk sometimes. Without Jesus, I'm fucked. My life has been, and may yet be, a world of shit, and the only thing that gets me through is my faith in the Almighty God. Who, by the way, knows exactly what I'm thinking, at all times.

He knows what I really mean to say when I drop coy little euphemisms. I know what I really wanted to say, I ain't even close to fooling Him.

Now, amusingly, I don't cuss nearly as much as I used to. I've calmed down, and with that calm comes fewer situations where I use anything close to "bad" words. It's not that I mind them, it's just that I don't feel that the sentence I'm about to speak requires a word like that as often.

When I talk to people, I try, to the best of my ability, to give them the absolute, unvarnished, no-frills truth. If you ask me for my opinion on something, you'll get it. I'm sure that I could develop the ability to lie my way through life and give everything a nice sheen of euphemisms, but I'm not in the business of making people feel good, I'm in the business of speaking the truth.

The truth doesn't often make anyone feel warm and fuzzy, but it's not meant to. The truth is what we measure ourselves against, to see if we're full of shit or not. If we are, it becomes obvious once actual Truth shows up.

Funny thing is, the more practice I have with simply speaking the truth, the harder it is to get confused about what I'm supposed to say in a certain situation. There's no concerns about who'll get offended, or whether or not it's appropriate, it's the truth, and it'sa ALWAYS appropriate to speak the Truth. 

The truth is that without Jesus, I'm fucked.

I think He understands what I mean.