Posts Tagged ‘Matthew 5:14-16’

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Matthew 5:14-16

The story is told that Winston Churchill stuttered as a young child. This is the Winston Churchill whose later eloquence was probably the single-most important factor in saving western Europe from tyranny in the 1940s. Churchill stuttered as a self-conscious, frightened little boy.  Now there’s a developmental theory that would say his oratorical brilliance as an adult developed as a compensation for his childhood sense of inferiority.^[i] This “compen­sation theory” says that, for example, in our childhood or youth the challenges, say, of birth defects, of illness, of discrimina­tion, of poverty, of family craziness, or of other unfortunate circum­stances provide the very stimulus for all later higher achievements. In other words, this compensation theory would say that small, sickly, self-conscious, or sad chil­dren are driven by this principle of compen­sation to develop into towering leaders of activity and strength. Churchill would seem an example of it, and some of us here may identify with that very notion.

But there’s another “take” on why it is we grow into who we are, which is called the “acorn theory.”^[ii]  Grow­ing up is not about compensation; it’s about recov­ery. Each of us enters the world, some­thing like an acorn, with the seed of calling, with a sense of identity, with a vision of destiny. And so, of course Churchill stuttered as a child! Given this nascent, daunting sense as a child that his voice, his voice would be the instrument to save the western world, of course he stuttered as a child.  Wouldn’t you?  We may well have glimpsed our destiny or life’s calling when we were yet a child, but we might have avoided it, or denied it, or run from it.  In Jesus’ words, we may have put the light of our calling under a bushel basket. Read More