She leaned back in her chair, stretched her arms out across her thighs, and said,
“I don’t know if I understand more, but I have more words to talk about things now.”
It was the sort of thing I might expect to say after someone tells me all the ‘reasons’ why the earth is flat.
We’d been talking about the Trinity. About one God in three Persons. About how love isn’t just something God does. It’s what God is. How there is one divine Being—the What of God—and three distinct Persons—the Whos: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Like a star that’s never without its light, and light that’s never without its warmth. Each distinct, yet inseparable, sharing the same blazing life.
Her response caught me off guard. I heard it as skepticism, maybe cynicism, or at best cold indifference. Either way, I took it as a sign I’d missed the mark. A sign that I’d failed to communicate the beauty and majesty of the God we worship.
But what came next showed me my failure wasn’t in what I said, but in what I failed to see. She looked up and said, “So… when I pray, who do I talk to?”
In an instant, that question told me everything. Where I assumed distance, she was actually drawing near. Where I saw only dismissal, it was actually faith forming its first thoughts.
And suddenly her original words made sense. She wasn’t brushing it off. She was trying out a new language. One that felt strange in her mouth but was already shaping how she saw the world. She was learning to speak Christian.
Like a toddler realizing the sounds coming out of their mouth actually mean something. Yet it’s so much more than this. When a toddler speaks, what they discover is that the world answers. When they speak, someone speaks back. And what comes back is not echo or noise, but relationship. Language becomes a doorway into something much deeper—connection.
Faith often begins that way. It begins not in clarity but in vocabulary. The first miracle isn’t that we finally see everything clearly, but that we can begin to name what’s been happening all along.
Because naming changes how we see. We learn the words before we learn the wisdom.
We speak the grammar of faith before we understand the landscape it describes. Every new word—Father, Son, Spirit; grace; mercy; love—opens a little more of the world of God to us.
It’s how any language works. Children say the word light long before they grasp what light is. They say love long before they understand its cost. And Christians learn to say Father long before they understand all it means to belong.
We talk our way into understanding. We borrow the church’s words until they become our own. And over time, those words shape the world we can see. A world where God is not distant, not silent, but calling, answering, inviting.
Maybe that’s why her question stayed with me. She wasn’t grasping for right doctrine.
She was reaching for the one behind the doctrine. She was learning the language before the logic. She was beginning to speak Christian.
And maybe that’s what the Spirit has been teaching all of us all along. Not how to explain a mystery, but how to live inside it. Not how to sound religious, but how to join the conversation of a God who has been speaking our names since before we had words at all.