“When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things”

I trust that your (potentially) extra long Fourth of July weekend was great.  While catching up on some reading I came across what seems a pretty silly conversation, but it got me thinking about things we don’t know and still with all of the internet available to us, there still isn’t a right answer.  In this case, it is the pronunciation of the term GIF (graphic interface function).  You know, those mostly silly short video loops that we embed in text messages and emails.  This topic of how to pronounce GIF was even taken up by the The Economist Magazine in this article with a global survey of how we pronounce the term.  What struck me about all of this is that (if you are like me, you don’t  know either), when faced with having to say GIF out loud you might to do like me and say, “GIF as in Gift of Jif as in Jiffy…whatever it is, you know what I mean.”  Basically, I have been embarrassingly punting knowing the right way to say it ever since I first saw the term.  And, I would go out on the limb to guess that we all have other things in our work and lives that we do the same.  We don’t really know, but we don’t want to look foolish and ask, so we have been faking it for a long time.  This is fine, until one day we are expected to know and then we don’t.

Paul challenges us in this area with how we conduct ourselves and what is important to us.  As he describes what is considered childish, he is also saying to us that if we are going to say that we believe then we ought to know what it is that we believe and take the time and effort to study God’s Word to become better at understanding what it is that God is saying to us.  Spoiler alert:  We have limited time in the bodies that God has given us, so each day can be thought of as a GIFt received or a GIFt wasted.  Let’s not let our lives play out as the silly GIF loop that has us stuck and not moving forward. That much, we can know.

Reference:  1 Corinthians 13:11 (New Living Translation)