Words

Yesterday I heard the word “impervious” used by a reporter.  I like words, and I particularly like the word impervious.  It means  not allowing something to enter or pass through.  It means  being impenetrable (I like that word too).   The reporter used impervious in this phrase “impervious to evidence.”  I like that phrase too and it kept running through my mind all day.

Words have always fascinated me.  Currently I’m reading a biography of Theodore Roosevelt written by William Roscoe Thayer in 1919.  Some of the words and phrases used in that time have long since been archived (what a shame!), but they still fascinate me.  Here are a few that caught my attention:  acidly cantankerous,  jeremiad, piratical businesses, degenerate miscreants, rapacious politicians, shrewd slander, cosmic joke book, pleaders of iniquity, magnetism, injudicious condescension, omnivorous reading.  

I am digressing from my original thought (you see how words transport me?).   “Impervious to evidence” describes what I alluded to yesterday when I wrote of those alleged Christians who abuse and misuse the Bible even after all the scholarly research of the last century.  They will not deal with what is now factually known; they are impervious to evidence.  

Canadian Rockies

But the phrase also applies to those pseudo-intellectuals who deny the possibility of God.  They too, are impervious to evidence.  Men and women through the ages have claimed that their lives have been changed, revolutionized, and transformed by their encounter with the Living God.  Their stories are real—from Francis of Assisi to Albert Schweitzer. But this evidence is ignored by those who deny the existence of a spiritual world.  They have not studied the Story of the Bible, nor have they read the Christian classics.  They are not unlike those alleged Christians who abuse and misuse the Bible (and who haven’t read the Christian classics either).  They too, are (and aren’t we all—given our stance, whatever it may be) impervious to evidence?