Give War a Chance?

I don’t have much time these days for superfluous writing (thus the scarcity of posts), but I enjoyed this anecdote from French class.

One of my peers was asked to translate a sentence. The answer should have been “No one was waiting at the station,” but as it turns out, the French word for “station” looks similar to the French word for “war.” She looked at the sentence for a few moments, trying to tie the various words together in a coherent way, and finally came up with:

“War waits for no one”?

How dramatically one word can change the understanding of an entire sentence! Though the principle is much more dramatic when comparing different languages, it applies to speakers of the same language as well.

Let us be patient in our misunderstandings with one another. Misunderstanding is too abundant to be avoidable, so there is much room to extend grace.