140 Meaning Influences Understanding

Meaning: “conveying a significance that is not directly expressed . . .”

Personal Finding #2: Meaning influences understanding and can be difficult to identify and express without practice.

Definition: Understanding— “1. Ability to grasp meaning; 2. Knowledge of something (Encarta).”

There are infinite meanings to be made in life from great to small, striking to humble, and they affect understanding in multiple ways. In that meaning can easily be overlooked, misconstrued, fractured into a mixed message, be wrongly associated or lost, and more; understanding can easily be compromised. On the other hand, in that meaning can act as a true anchor to ideas and concepts, understanding can be solidly enhanced and promoted. Thus God’s insistence on a top-priority relationship with people so that right meaning can be derived from His Word, learned, absorbed, retained and applied.

Right meaning has a powerful positive effect on understanding, Gentle Reader. It can help rightly form a person’s attitudes, actions and behavior by complementing knowledge-based understanding with multi-faceted implications, enhancing a person’s ability to perceive and function and ushering one into the way of wisdom. Scripture repeatedly asserts that wisdom comes from God, that understanding from God accompanies wisdom and both are His to give or withhold. Thus God’s desire for us to take our meanings from Scripture not from the world (opinion), the flesh (appetites) or the devil (and his half-truths).

In fact, Scripture points out that people in general, acting on their own, independent of God (airhead debutantes like me included, unless they are /I am studied-up on the subject and rooted in God’s Word and gifted with His wisdom and understanding) can poorly understand how to express what something means at all, much less rightly or wrongly, be it great or small.

Consider a small thing, remembering as described above that meaning can be overlooked, blocking understanding: If a woman breaks into tears over the gift of a rose from a suitor, she may or may not be able to explain that her thinking about the romantic message behind the rose is what has caused her feeling, not just the rose itself. Keep in mind, meaning runs deep in everything, even simple-seeming things.

As for more complex things? Well, this next situation is a classic grab-bag of mixed and even deliberately misconstrued meaning.

You see, meaning can routinely get scrambled—still be there, but be fractured and profoundly confused. Consider this: people are famous for over-eating, thus the frequent image of someone taking out the quart of ice cream and mindlessly eating every bit of it (from the container!). Oh, I can feel their satisfaction now! They know their eating is causing them pleasure and they know that there are very few things out there as pleasurable as ice cream or as available. Besides, they think, everyone knows that ice cream is better than any tranquilizer!

Anyway, doctor after doctor tries to prompt people to understand that over-eating is mostly an effort to satisfy the emotions and, to protect the body, should be stopped. People hate to be told this because it interferes with their very gratifying pastime, in this instance, consuming ice cream. So what if eating is bad for the body, they think! It is great for the emotions! The doctor said as much himself. They refuse to consider the subject any further and they hate the doctor even more for telling them to quit eating what they want. (Me, too!)

Upshot? They only become more protective of this favorite experience, keeping them from adapting, from taking the best (the well-meaning of the advice) and letting the rest go—in this case the best part of the intended advice would sound more like this— eat your ice cream and enjoy it, but exercise appetite control when you do. See, not so bad, is it?

Moral of the story: People don’t want to understand some things because getting the doctor’s meaning might kill a great pleasure. People would rather believe they know what means most, certainly at least to them, and ignore what others think should mean most to them. What a shame to miss the best all because of short-sighted meaning-making! Thinking others only want to wring all pleasure out of life, they short-circuit the positive meaning-making opportunity the doctor offers and critically compromise their own understanding and future good.

Amazing, huh? We all do it, be it in doctor situations or whatever. Don’t you think?

To be continued . . .