YHWH (Faith+Hope+Love)

   Sitting in church I scribble down as many notes as I can as my pudgy fingers try to keep up turning the thin little pages of my Bible. The pastor says something profound---the only reason I know is because I hear a whooshing "aww", "praise God", and "oh, hallelujah" over the crowd. I sit there half disappointed I didn't understand. I quickly forget about it as I feel it won't affect my Christianity if I don't have those extra church "terms" in my pocket.

         Have you ever been here before?

   Well, it happened to me for the last time (hopefully). I had a moment; a sun-filled-awakening in my mind. It "dawned" on me (pun intended) that it's like someone who is trying learning a new language. If you just repeat what everyone else says, you'll never have an understanding and you most certainly won't be able to communicate with those you're trying to. You're very limited only to what you can remember to repeat. Same is with this-- If I just let these words, terms, stories, and parables go by without trying to first understand them then they will never be RELEVANT to me and I won't have an understanding of what they really mean.
     Like the time I was in Mexico and someone told me how to say "It's hot!" in Spanish...or so I thought. Because what I really said apparently was much worse and made my tour guide hit on me the entire day.
     This week's inquiry was about the term "Yahweh"....I literally had no idea what it meant. So, I googled it like any young Internet-dependant-junkie would. Here's a little bit from what I learned:


In the Old Testament God declared that His name was YHWH (Exodus 6:3; 20:7; see also 3:14). Scholars believe that "YHWH," or "Yahweh" is the third person singular form of the ancient Hebrew verb, "haya," meaning "to be." The basic thrust of this verb describes the state of existence. As the third person form of haya, Yahweh literally means "He is," or "He exists." It is a description of who God is. He is the self-existing one.
To understand the import of this we must understand the nature of Hebrew names. Hebrew names are not simply nominal devices used to identify one person from another as they are in the English language; they are actually sentences in themselves. It is similar to how the Indians named their children "rising sun" or "running bear." These were not quite complete sentences, but they were descriptions (partial sentences). God's name, YHWH, is a full sentence. It just so happens to be the shortest sentence in any language--"I am."1


   Pretty cool. Much more so than trying to fake what it really means and looking like a dufus.

TIPS: 1. USE THE RESOURCES WE HAVE AVAILABLE TO US!!! Who knows how long we will have these freedoms for.
2. Don't be to cool-for-school when it comes to not knowing something- most people have the same question!
3. Check out the song below.








               Feedback? Criticisms? Comments?

-audreykay