Jack’s Winning Words 8/1/14
“There are some experiences in life they haven’t invented the right words for.”    (Lisa Kleypas)  It has always puzzled me…How do you describe the indescribable?  Infinity?  God?  Love?  A miracle?  Art?  Others?  Often ad-writers add this tag, “You have to see it.”  When it comes to spiritual experiences, there are no right words.  You know it when you have it!  Maybe life is better with its mysteries.    ;-)  Jack

FROM RI IN BOSTON:  I go along with your suggestion that "maybe life is better with its mysteries."  Learning the reality of some things can bring with it disappointment.  (Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and the tooth fairy come to mind.)  About needing the "right words" to communicate, at my age I'm having enough difficulty using common words that have been around for a long time. ====JACK:  Communication (in all its forms) is a matter of finding the right word(s) so that the other person can (better) understand.  And even then, we really don't know it's been successful.

FROM GOOD DEBT JON:  How about: twi-right? That brief moment with a good book as you consider the authors words or your thoughts inspired by the author as you drift off to blissful sleep. Twiright.====JACK:  You can add another career to the many that you already have.  You can be a neologist!

FROM TARMART REV:  If you were to try and describe such an experience in your life with me, Jack, I'd believe you because we are that close and would not dishonor our relationship with a falsehood . . . but with a great many that come my way purporting what God had showed them or some supernatural encounter that defies reasoning or Biblical support, I politely listen, smile and reply, "That must have been some experience!"====JACK:  I once was in a hospital room with a man who was dying.  He called me close and whispered..."Pastor, Jesus appeared there at the end of my bed last night and said, 'Everything's going to be alright!'  He was really there."  I believed that dying man, because it was "his" experience.

FROM MICHIZONA RAY:  I think the ineffable is described by the poet in verse, or the mythic tale, a parable, or other ethereal pursuits that seek to resonate the spirit of the object within another. The problem of language, in this sense, is that it is a temporal and spacial function that serves to apply to the eternal and infinite. It doesn't seem possible, in any literal sense, for the one to apply precisely to the other. Just as the phrase tells us: the East is east and the West is west, and never the twain shall meet.====JACK:  The word "ineffably" certainly fits with today's quote.  I can't ever remember using it in a conversation, but I can remember singing it in the hymn, Crown Him With Many Crowns..."Creator of the rolling spheres, ineffably sublime." 

FROM FACEBOOK LIZ:  Yes, life is better with mysteries.====JACK:  Your dad probably remembers the weekly radio drama..."I Love a Mystery."  A favorite "mystery" verse from the Bible is Proverbs 30:19.

FROM RS IN TEXAS:  I agree - if we could describe or quantify everything it seems the emotion would go out of it.  Don't think I would want to be a Vulcan - life would be too boring.====JACK:  So, you're a Star Trek fan.  The Vulcan I know is the mythological God of fire, sometimes thought of as Satan.  I remember when Goodyear tires were advertised as having been vulcanized, meaning that they had been manufactured using heat and sulphur in the process.

FROM PLAIN FOLKS CHESTER:  Perhaps the reason there are no words for some of these experiences is that we all see them in a different way.====JACK:  How do we know if we all see colors in the same way?  Perhaps what I see as red appears to you as yellow, and you just call it, red.  Regardless...we do see situations and circumstances and people and religion in our personal way