(In which I ramble about becoming...)

As a public service announcement, I'm informing you that you might not actually want to bother reading this post. It's boring. It's meandering. And it doesn't include fun adventures with taxis or foods! (It does, however, include lots of grammar, quotation marks, and parenthetical expressions.)

Sure you want to continue?

Okay, be my guest.

I had read on a friend's* blog a post about becoming a certain type of person. If you could choose one word to describe your ideal self, what would it be? Joyful, loving, spontaneous, kind, meek, humble, giving, hospitable, gracious, elegant, strong - what? I had asked myself that question, too, years ago and had "my word" chosen for about seven years now - and then last week was blessed to have several people use it to describe me. Great. (No, really!) Now - onwards and upwards! I guess my next choice will have to be "humble." Groan. All of my most difficult life experiences can be traced, I think, to specific prayers for God to make me humble. (I think this is why I became a chemistry major: so I'd have to face humility through Physical Chemistry.)

But that's not really why I'm rambling on, now. Other meandering thoughts of mine center on the word "becoming" - first, it's a process. This is even more evident in Arabic. (Another reason I love languages - beyond the funny sound alike words like "Toot" which means "berry" - is the word studies you get out of it. Just be thankful I'm not a man, so I can't become a preacher and inflict Greek upon my congregation.) In Arabic, there is a distinct lack of "linking/helping" verbs - is, are, were, etc**. For example, you don't say, "I am here," it's simply ana hone, "I here." It's very similar to Latin, in that regard. So in English, I would normally say I want *to be* something: a doctor, a wise person, an astronaut, proficient in twenty languages, whatever. I refer to the end product, glossing over the process of becoming. However, in Arabic I must say I want *to become* something: a lawyer, a nun, a servant, hospitable, or a friend or whatever. There is no skipping from the present to the final future state. You have to admit that, whatever your end goal is, you are still in the process of becoming it. There is no "To be, or not to be," - that is not the question. It is "To become, or not to become." This is a good reminder: we are all becoming something, someone. Who am I becoming? ***

Secondly, in English, we can use "becoming" as an adjective: "That dress is becoming on you." So, make sure who you are becoming is becoming!

All of that merely to say, I've had two very specific verses on my mind recently, that I've seen evidently lived out. Proverbs 21:19, 25:24/21:4. Look it up.

*Okay, actually not a friend, technically. I've never met her; she has no idea who I am. I have, however, stalked. Stalking is one of my spiritual gifts. I am considering a second career in JSOC.

**Obviously, this is not the entire story. You see, the specific type of sentence that I'm using as an example is a "nominal sentence": it's composed of nouns and the "predicate" nouns to describe the "subject" (put in English terms, hence the quotation marks). In the present tense, you merely use the nouns. If you put it in the past tense, you would use the conjugated form of the verb "kaan." There is also a form of "kaan" for the future, such as "I will be a teacher." However, you wouldn't use it in a sentence such as "I want to be a teacher," referring to a future state that you want to obtain. So, there are forms of "to be" in Arabic, but not like there are in English. And, of course, there is more to say on the subject of the existence of "kaan" in the "present" tense, but that would just get boring.

***Keats has a very good passage on this world being a place of formation of souls - while I obviously do not agree with all his theological conclusions, he makes several good observations. Also, Lewis in "Weight of Glory" has a good bit to say about our either becoming "eternal wonders or eternal horrors."