... who winks maliciously with his eye, signals with his feet and motions with his fingers – Proverbs 6:13

Today’s Scripture Reading (March 30, 2013): Proverbs 6

There was a “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode where Captain Picard gets kidnapped and placed in a room with three other people. The room has a door, but it turns out the door is false and there is just a wall behind it. So in essence, he is in a room with three other people with different personalities – one of them is a pacifist but another is very violent in nature – and there is no way in or out of the room. Finally, we are introduced to the kidnappers and they are a people who communicate telepathically. And we find out that they believe that they are superior because they do not need words to get their ideas across to each other – and so their experiments with Picard and the three other captives are justified. At the close of the program the kidnappers are standing on the bridge of the Enterprise talking with the Captain of the ship. And Picard is communicating with them with words, but with his crew through gestures. So finally the formerly captive Picard becomes then captor. And the message he has for his captors is that just because he does not communicate telepathically does not mean that he is unable to communicate silently. With a crew that knows him, every gesture has a meaning.

The author of Proverbs understands that. And his message to his son is to be careful with people – because those who have an evil bent will say nice things with their mouths, while communicating something very different with their bodies. And the message seems to be that if you want to understand the truth about the people around you, you cannot ignore the body language of people. We get that. Body language is something that a lot of us try to read.

So sometimes we may purposely communicate with our body a message we are not saying with our mouths. But sometimes, our body simply betrays us. We want to appear to be one way, but our actions are telling a very different story. A few years ago I was standing in a crowded room and someone who was trying to give me information and I was writing the information down with a mechanical pencil – and my pencil kept on breaking. So finally the person I was talking to said “you just want to get rid of me. You are in a hurry and that is why your pencil keeps breaking.” She was reading something that I was not saying in the language of my actions. And partially she may have been right. People were queuing up behind her to speak to me – but I also struggle with mechanical pencils even when I am alone in my office. The author of Proverbs wants his son to understand the multiple ways we communicate – specifically the eyes, the hands and the feet - because relying on a single body message may lead us into error.

In either instance, we need to understand that the full message of others – and the message that we are communicating – is not fully communicated with the voice. We need to be aware of the other ways that we all communicate if we want to find the truth. And we all want truth.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Proverbs 7