Trapter 1

Thus began my brother Noah’s fictional story of a boy moving to Kenya – I beleive there were 4 “trapters”. He wrote it a while ago, in early elementary school, and it is a story that has become an integral part of our familial dialect -we still use his phrase “jet-legged and eggsalsted” whenever we are really tired. It just seems to fit.

As a supposed linguist/soon-to-be SLP/wanna-be orthographer, I find his spelling both endearing and very logical: “trapter” for “chapter”, “eggsalsted” for “exhausted”. Hey, they really make sense.

If only all our English spelling was that easy. And whose idea was it to spell it P-H-O-N-I-C-S, anyway? We aren’t really Greek anymore . . . are we?

Onward.

I’ve heard people say that there is no God, but if there is, he must be unimaginably cruel – an assumption based on all the heartache aned evil in the world. As I read through Isaiah, though, I see the exact opposite; I see a God who is righteous in his judgment of man’s sin, who is just in destroying the wicked, but who is gracious beyond measure. For after the judging, comes this:

Isaiah 25:8-9 “He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”

He is not unimaginably cruel. He is unimaginably kind.