One of my screen savers is a succession of floating vocabulary words. Lovely letter combinations in fading shades of blue and white cascade across the screen, one stopping now and again to be joined by its dictionary definition. Who doesn’t need to expand their vocabulary, right?
One particular morning the defined word resting in view when I sat down was “Virago.” It is defined as follows:
vi·ra·go
vəˈrägō,-ˈrā-/
The initial definition saddened me. Do you ever feel that way, like a “domineering, violent, or bad-tempered woman”? I do - more often in my own mind than out, I hope. But in or out, the masked spirit is still ugly.
But it was the deeper definition that struck a cord. In its origin, THIS was the word given to Eve BY Adam Vir ‘man’ - originally it meant a heroic woman, a female warrior. My English version of the Bible says he named her this because she would be the mother of all living. It takes a hero, a woman warrior to mother all of humanity - ha even ONE of humanity.
Can you imagine this definition? Can you embrace it? Envisioning us at the beginning of beautiful creation, before we had fallen to the first of many missteps in which we would trust our own minds over the heart of God?
And is it that action, the taking of matters into our own minds, into our own hands, that transforms us from “heroic, woman warrior” to the harpy creature defined as “domineering, violent and bad-tempered”?
My prayer is that as I daily submit my heart and mind back to the One who designed it, like Gomer choosing finally and forever to stay faithful to Hosea, my heart and countenance will shed their warts and rantings, letting them fade into the lovely, yet fierce image of a woman at the dawn of creation. The crown jewel of all God had made.
Who knew vocabulary could lead to spiritual transformation?!
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