No Periods, Please

Otis Moss, III said that in the grammar of this life, God alone has the right to employ the use of a period. No friend, no enemy, no human authority including us has the authority to declare “it is finished” about anything or anyone. God alone is Alpha and Omega. We do have at our disposal, however, a range of other punctuation: semi-colons for a pause; exclamation points for emphasis; and commas especially when we anticipate something more yet to come.

When our family moved to New Hampshire, people warned us that the climate is deadly to rose bushes, period. We planted a rose bush anyway, and while our first two winters here almost finished it off, something in its biological imagination refused to settle for a wintry end. It rejected the “period” and chose instead to grow steadily to a current height of three feet. A ninth grader I know well was diagnosed a few years ago with a rare bone disease, and was told he might never play contact sports again – period. Something within his soul, however, rejected the sentence of that “period,” and informed me just the other day that he is looking forward to his first downhill race this winter.

How many young people have wound up addicted, violent, depressed or homeless because a parent or an adult placed a period after their names, instead of a comma? Has anyone ever told you you weren’t worthy, beautiful, or talented? If so, God has taken that period, brushed a little tail onto in, and gleefully promised that much more is yet to come forth from your amazing life. All things are possible with God because God alone has the last word, and if we listen....is indeed still speaking!