'Reliability' Receives the Gold Rating

 In the last few weeks I’ve been part of a team organising a day’s event for women in our church called Accelerate (we hold it two or three times a year). Walking down the road towards the event venue on the morning of the great day I began thinking of the word  ‘reliable’ and decided it should be reserved a special place of honour in the Oxford English dictionary and written in gold ink. An underrated virtue, I think. Perhaps the Biblical equivalent is ‘faithfulness.’ If you’re required to do something, you do it. No excuses at the last minute. No forgetting and turning onto other things. Reliability is a prime virtue, I would say. Praise God for the reliable .. their names are written in ... my book for being asked to do more things in future … is that the way God thinks? It would appear so from the Bible!

This got me thinking. What other words should receive the gold rating?

 Mercy, definitely. Watching ‘Les Miserables’ touched a deep chord

inside; it sort of set my spirit spinning. I mean, seeing the Bishop of Digne give the beggar, Jean Valjean, his fine silver candlesticks after the violation of his former goodness by Valjean spoke volumes. He showed mercy, a costly act of self-giving with the purpose of redeeming another. 'Blessed are the merciful...'

The next gold-rating word is surely gratitude. Gratitude makes a relationship and mends a frayed one; it turns a tension between two people on its head and transforms ‘reserved’ service into whole-hearted service. It also puts a smile on our faces, puts cheer into a dull day and helps us aspire to even greater things in the future…
Gratitude, I've noticed, also takes our relationship with God a long way and restores the distance we sometimes feel with Him.
 
I like cheerful people so the word cheerfulness will also receive the gold rating today. Cheerfulness is doing what we have to do, even the boring or hard parts, with a generosity of spirit that doesn’t keep adding up the personal cost to ourselves. It can bear the arduous things with a lightness, even  humour, and counts it a joy to do these things for Jesus’ sake.  Its twin is surely wholeheartedness.

Adventure must be another gold-rating word for life without adventure is so dull. In fact, after several hours of furniture removing and sometimes too tired to sleep this week, I woke up on this Accelerate morning with a sense of adventure, a looking forward to the day. It was definitely going to be experimental. Life would be, yes, just awful without adventure.

Humility and willingness are two of a pair if ever there was one:  I love people who are willing, willing to do anything. ‘Would you mind … emptying the bins?’ … ‘Of course’ … ‘Would you be OK with clearing up the mess afterwards?’ ‘Of course … is there anything else you want me to do? ‘Blessed are the humble-willing … they are prepared to put aside their self-interest for the good of us all.

Then there is encouragement – I mean, not everything went brilliantly on this day but those who encourage us do not overplay  the mistakes we all make; they focus on the good bits and build on that.  Many a word of encouragement has halted me at the top, or halfway down, a muddy slippery slope ... helping me avoid the big splash at the bottom! 

I could go on, there’s so many more words worthy of the gold-rating: patience, discipline, grace, justice and more. Patience: I know as a teacher that one word of impatience can undermine many patient words. 

 I believe that in embracing all these we find the freedom that Jesus promised.

Hey, but above all, there is the Word of Words, the twenty-four karat one, love, that encompasses all these things, the sum, the total of our Christian calling, the word that is synonymous with Love Himself, love’s epitome, Jesus Christ. 

Editors of the Oxford Dictionary ... here is my non-definitive list of golden words! Take note!