This is a sign I stare at every time I am on the elliptical machine at the gym.

You in the fitness. It doesn’t fail to bring a smile. Me, in the fitness.

But more than that, it points to how tricky language can be. How nuanced. How loaded. Something so right in one language can sound so very wrong in another.

I stare at it and think of what my heart language, my native tongue, should have been: LOVE, FAITH, HOPE, CONTENTMENT.

But instead I learned to speak the foreign language of hatred, disbelief, despair, and discontentment.

We were meant for paradise. For harmony. For love. But we doubted, and that doubt led to disobedience which led to death and brokenness. And that which should have been my native tongue became a foreign one.

I so often miss that brokenness was never meant to come so naturally to me and certainly not from me. It wasn’t meant to come so easily to those around me either. But it does. We must learn to speak how we should have been speaking all along.

A major lie that has been sown far and wide is that we can’t speak it fluently, so why try.

But here’s the truth, as with any language, I can learn. You can learn. We can learn. Our vocabulary can be added to. The grammar of love can be studied and played with. New ways of looking at a concept can be cultivated.

I am growing in my ability to speak how the perfected me will speak one day. But like that cloudy mirror mentioned to the Corinthians, too often I have a thick tongue. What I mean to say comes out the spiritual version of, “You in the fitness.”

Forgiveness enormous more than pointing.

Patience more better than swish.

God is so colleague better.

You in the fitness. You in the broken Eden.  Read this sign and be encouraged. You will not always speak so brokenly, so woundingly, so awkwardly. Begin to try now to speak how you will speak then.

To speak your true native language, the language of Eden.

What new faith vocabulary are you learning these days?