Meaning: “conveying a significance that is not directly expressed . . .”
Personal Finding #3: Meaning influences thinking content and enriches or complicates the content of any subject and therefore enriches or complicates total comprehension.
The search for meaning is a productive cognitive pursuit, Gentle Reader. Add it to a fundamentally sound mind and you have, as a result, increased and enhanced mental powers. Add knowledge and understanding and wisdom and you have a mind with dimension and clout. Add love and you have a great person.
Scripture recommends sound mind. Scripture calls knowledge power. Scripture sees understanding, defined among other things as the ability to grasp meaning, as part of wisdom. Scripture calls wisdom wealth of being. Scripture also calls foolishness poverty of being. As seen from God’s highest perspective, there is a real less and more situation going on here, Gentle Reader.
In short, meaning-making adds to the sum total of the person, both magnifying total being. Bare-bone thinking alone is not sufficient to recommend it for exclusive foundation. Resplendent being must have more substance, and through meaning-making that substance appears.
To illustrate, looking beyond the obvious in life, or conversation, or anything really, to latent or hidden content such as “meaning,” for me expands on the inherent potential of life. This is a late finding for me. As the “baby” in my birth family, I was always behind everyone else in “getting it”— getting meaning or knowledge or skills and abilities, getting anything really. Combine that with being an airhead debutante and I was chronically pretty clueless.
Needless to say, I did not like that situation and I can reasonably suppose it served to propel me along the road toward my lifelong desire for meaning in my life. That being said, and considering how sensitized to the subject I became, I think I was also propelled to find right meaning—meaning that was nothing less than the best.
In my journey toward right meaning, many influences were in competition for my allegiance, ultimately prompting my sort-outs, if you recall. And thanks to my sort-outs, I divined that God was Significant Truth #1in the box of life. We are currently exploring my Significant Truth #2: Meaning.
As I have affirmed before, being that God is #1, one can expect to find virtually everything-but-everything I do rooted in this finding. Now, with “meaning” being #2, I have discovered that meaning is a by-product of #1. By that I mean that I have realized that right meaning can only exist in the context of God—as an adjunct to His wisdom through understanding. Holy Spirit pointed me to this, I am sure. Wisdom and Understanding are major Scriptural concepts and values.
To be continued . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment