Knowing the Tune

Mark Twain used to swear a blue streak and his good Christian wife put up with it for thirty years. When they moved into that beautiful house in Hartford, Connecticut she decided she was going to be done with Mark’s swearing. So one day, when he nicked himself shaving, he let go with a classic paragraph and the whole room turned purple. She walked over to him, looked up at him, and repeated every word he said! He was enough of a nineteen-century chauvinist to be taken-a-back – and then all of a sudden he smiled and he said, “My dear! You’ve got all the words right, but you don’t know the tune!” I want to be kind of person who gets the words right... AND knows the tune! Because it’s the tune that the world hears. It doesn’t matter how much you talk or show up at church, it doesn’t matter if you have a little fish on your bumper – it’s what people see in our lives everyday.

Images of Hope: Christ the Dolphin March 10, 1985

-- photo credit: America's Library