Today’s special edition post is from Tova Dad, my favorite daughter and Virtual Assistant. She lives outside of Amarillo with her husband and their two daughters.
It is way past bedtime for me, but I imagine some of you can relate to getting “stuck” on the internet when you should be sleeping.
A wise person (to whom I cannot give credit because I can’t find the joke again) once said something along the lines of “I got online to look up the conversion of milliliters to cups, and the next thing I knew, I was watching a documentary on the birth of wild giraffes!”
I didn’t deviate quite that much, but I started out using Google Translate to understand some Norwegian text I had come across. After my questions had been answered, I started playing with other languages, especially those that offered a audible playback for the translation.
Then, I played around with family names. I love the etymology of names! For instance Tova, translated to Hebrew on google, means “favor,” but if the languages are reversed, the word comes back as “goodness,” or ‘his goodness.” The Hebrew root of my name, tov, is not just to congratulate someone, (mazel tov!), but actually makes its first appearance with in a different setting in the 4th verse in the 1st chapter in Genesis:
“Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was [tov] good. Then he separated the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:3-4).
Don’t worry. I won’t let it go to my head.
Then I started to play around with Persian, or Farsi.
For those who don’t know, my husband is half Iranian, and our last name is pronounced much more like Daad or Dodd, than a shortened version of what you call your daddy.
Something we take pride in is the meaning of our family name: Justice.
My daughters named my husband’s truck Green Justice because, as you might imagine, it is green, and our family name means justice. He tried to negotiate a different name, but they refuse to call it anything other than Green Justice.
We’ve tried to instill in them an obligation to make wrong things right again, and to stand up bravely and use their voices to bring justice to a wrong situation.
We’ve even claimed a passage in the book of Zechariah as sort of a family motto:
“…This what the Lord Almighty said: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other’” (Zechariah 7:9-10).
Now back to Google Translate!
I entered “Dad” on the English side and got بابا on the Persian side, which translated the noun to “dad, daddy, father, pa, baba, papa” (we call my husband Baba).
I entered Justice on the English side and got عدالت on the Persian side, with the noun translations of “justice, fairness, sword.”
Now, I definitely don’t speak more than a handful of Persian words, but I knew those characters were not ones I had seen for the family surname Dad.
I did some fiddling with the translator and was able to enter the Persian characters داد and the English translation came back with (drumroll please) “gave.”
Gave?!
That was a surprise!
But then I looked at the noun definitions for which داد can also be synonymous: “justice, shout, squeal, outcry.”
There’s way more to unpack here than I will cover today. But as I looked at the different ways that Dad could be used, I felt a familiar tap in my heart.
For my daughters, I’ve been trying to describe the indescribable way to listen to the Holy Spirit when God speaks to us. I can’t tell you what it’s like for others, but for me, it’s the sensation of a tap that means ‘sit up and pay attention.’
So I did, and my attention was quickly directed to the scripture my girls have been working to memorize:
“But God showed his love for us in that, while were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
And then I began thinking about the translation of ‘justice’ above – justice, fairness, and sword. Clearly that kind of justice is about what is fair and right, and in many cultures around the world, sometimes justice comes about by the wielding of a sword against an offender.
Just. Right. What they deserved.
But the book of Romans has a couple of other passage we need to remember:
“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).
Just. Right. What we deserved.
“…There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith” (Romans 3:22-25).
So, bad news for the ‘favors’ and ‘tovs’ out there. Being good isn’t good enough. And while justice is something we need to face, administer, shout, squeal, and cry out for, that’s still not good enough.
Our actions are permanently intertwined with our faith. They are vital to the outward expression of our faith. BUT IT ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH!
We have to accept what Jesus suffered to reconcile all our failures and receive the justice he GAVE for us.
As you fight for Justice in your circle of influence, don’t forget the gift of Amazing Grace – that you once were lost, but now you’re found, were blind but now can see.
