Emphasizing the Wrong syl-LAB-le

Ridicule. It’s a serious word with very serious implications. In my past, I have a very memorable encounter with that word, that was something short of life-changing and altogether different than what was intended.

I was a junior in high school and attending our church youth group. A senior was sharing with us a devotional that was intended to lead the youth group toward greater acceptance and tolerance of each other. However, in the height of irony, during her devotional, she consistently stressed the wrong syllable of the word “ridicule” and said, instead, the word “re-DIC-ule.” The word sounded just like the word “re-pickle” along with its various forms of “re-pickled” and “re-pickling.”

To give you a flavor, a sample sentence went something like this: “We all have to stop re-DIC-uling each other and admit that we don’t like it when we’re re-DIC-uled, either.”

The first 3 or 4 times, the crowd of about 100 teens went from confused to gracious. At first, we didn’t know what she was saying. Then, we figured she was nervous and was just misreading. However, somewhere around the 15th mention of “re-DIC-ule,” youthful silliness got the best of us. Giggling turned to crying and several pulled stomach muscles from holding in the hilarity.

The content of this poor girl’s devotional was excellent, I’m sure. However, in the oft repeated singular mistake of her presentation, the content was lost and a memory created.

I do wonder, how much of our good content in parenting is missed because we stress the wrong syl-LAB-le. We can be prone to stress obedience, cooperation, service, even humility. Yet, all the while, missing grace.

Without grace, obedience can become legalism, cooperation can become coercion, service becomes servitude and humility can become subservience. Without grace, all of our intentions of good and godliness can be misinterpreted or missed altogether.

When we stress the wrong syl-LAB-le by missing grace, we present our children with a skewed perspective on who God is. They may fail to see their acceptance as solely based on the grace of God and rather see it as based on their responses to God.

Grace is love and acceptance that happens when justice is deserved. Grace is the choice of love in the face of wrong doing. Grace is the expression of a compassionate heart. Grace is the great distinguisher of our faith and the great characteristic of our God. It ought to find its way into our homes through our parenting and it ought to be the one trait that our children see when they look back on their experience in our homes.

So, if you are tempted to stress dis-cip-LINE, or o-be-DI-ance, or even RE-spect, consider changing your stressed syl-LAB-le to grace. Not only will it lead to a better, happier home, but it only has one syllable, so it’s very tough to mispronounce.