The other day I was finishing an email to some otherwise wonderful Christians who, in my opinion, were stepping way out of line in matters of age and racial discrimination of the subtle but searing sort that still infects our culture. As my fingers steamed toward the end of the mostly loving email, I pounded out the closing greeting and typed my name. Before hitting the ‘Send’ button I gave it a last re-read, stopped, and laughed. In my righteous haste I had signed off not with the predictable, “Your Brother in Christ,” but with the spicy, “Your Bother in Christ.” Yes I did. After prayer and fasting, I did change back to the safer title before sending it forth to the proverbial “Others.”

My denomination is the United Methodist Church. It has a great history of advocating for women’s right to vote, the end of slavery, affirming civil rights, calling for pension and health insurance for workers injured on the job . . . all as extensions of what it means to follow Jesus. It also is a denomination that lives up to the saying, “Where there are two Methodists there are three opinions.” So folks within local churches and within the larger denomination occasionally knock heads about this or that subject, just as other churches do and, may I add, folks with no church to rile but plenty of attitude and spleen to vent in merry unsanctified ways.

Last month I was writing another note to someone about the travails of the Untied Methodist Church, when I noticed I had flipped two letters in the title. Flip the “I” and the “t” and ‘United’ becomes ‘Untied.’ I corrected the error, only to wonder if my fingers were more honest than the rest of me.

This is not a meditation on the existential possibilities of misspelling words. It is a musing on how, for all of us, our deeper convictions occasionally bubble to the surface through the ‘Freudian slip’ or the odd misspelling or misstatement that, viewed anew, express our deeper and true feelings or beliefs.

Jesus once said, “Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no,’ for more than that is sure to cause trouble” (Matthew 5:37). We are sailing into an election season where it will be raining words in a perfect storm of ego-driven hurricanes. At work, school, home, church, and wherever, words wash over our ears in a crescendo of conflicting values and demands. Lost in the storm can be our ability to know or express what we truly believe about this or that, the noble use of ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’

The better we know and claim our deepest values, the less we will speak and the more we will listen with wise and selective ears. Not to engage and decide what most passionately claims your allegiance is to live each day adrift in incoherence. If your language or typing starts to surprise you with political incorrectness, maybe there is something deeper at work. Take it from your “Bother in Christ.” Check it out.