You probably remember from somewhere back in 2nd grade a paperback English workbook that had .all those fill-in-the-blank sentences in which you were to write homographs….No?…You don’t remember?
Well, for those who are rusty, a homograph is a word that’s spelled and pronounced exactly like another word, but it means something totally different. Here’s an example:
We can store the extra food in the freezer.
Let’s go to the tire store and look at a new set of Michelins.
There are lots of these words of course, but I recently wrote a children’s book that had a lot to do with one particular set of homographs. It’s about the word pick. Now you may not be interested in a children’s book, but the concept of picking is pretty important all the way through high school and even college.
One kind of pick is “to choose,” as in “Did you pick study hall, yearbook or track-and-field for seventh period this year?” Another kind of pick means “to pluck,” as in “Eve picked the fruit from the tree and shared it with Adam.” (Another kind of pick is like picking your nose and yet another is like a dental pick or an ice pick, but we’ll save those for another day.)
Picking is very important when it comes to dating and marriage. You can pick (as in choose) who you think you might marry a bunch of times. I picked a red-headed boy named Robert when I was in the seventh grade. I just knew that one day we would live together in a little white cottage with a white picket fence and we’d have a little girl named Roberta. Unfortunately, Robert was in the ninth grade and he probably never even knew I got a flutter in my insides if he ever looked at me. Sad, but true.
In another sense, though, it’s not really all that sad. Robert “got over” me (I’m sure that was stressful for him…) and I moved on to a few more dream picks.
But pluck-picking is altogether different. See, once you plck an apple from a tree, you can never put it back, and once you’ve picked a husband or wife and plucked him or her from that world of single people, you can never put him/her back. He/she is yours forever!
Jesus said it this way:
And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.
The picking is very important. You can choose and re-choose in your mind (and you should do it very carefully as you honor God’s laws of purity) until you slip on the golden band of wedlock. But, regardless of what the world thinks about the ease of slipping from one marriage relationship to another…regardless of how effortless it seems for the celebrities to “move on” from one partner to another, once you’ve plucked a marriage partner, your committed in the eyes of your Father for the rest of your life.
Be choosy when you pick (choose), but be as sure as you can be when you pick (pluck)! You can’t put the apple back!
This article by Cindy Colley first appeared in Kaio e-zine, Kaio Publishing
