Bless Your Heart, No Offense, and all the JKs

     When I was a kid, I loved playing the Madden football games on PlayStation (yes, the first one). In my experience (and don't hate me for this), football video games are pretty much exactly the same as each other, minus a few nuances. But my favorite feature of the original Maddens that I've never found on any sports game since was the "mulligan" option, which allowed you to go back to before the previous play had taken place. Each player was allowed three mulligans per half (I think. Maybe per game), so no matter what happened to you, no matter how badly you "dropped the ball," you could just act like the play had never happened. It was beautiful. It was the football equivalent of a computer's "undo" button--or as a good friend calls it, the "repent" button.
     Sometimes, we act like we can mulligan the things we say to other people. We think we can say whatever we want and then take it back. Obviously, true repentance wipes us clean of guilt, but the effects of our words lasts. We've heard sayings about sticks and stones and how feathers that blow to the wind are impossible to retrieve again. To that, I think Han Solo is best qualified to respond:

     Words can hurt far worse than sticks and stones, and I think we all know that to a certain degree. But still, there's this habit in society of spitting out cutting words and then using a mulligan, hoping the person to whom we've spoken will take our comment to heart enough to change but no so much to hate us. We don't want the guilt.

     We all know these strategies: "No offense" is possibly the most common, and "jk" is part of any American's vernacular. I was born in Illinois, so the version with which I'm most familiar is "Bless your heart." Those three words have followed some of the worst, dirtiest, meanest insults I've ever heard. But they cover it up all nice and cozy with a cherry on top of the cyanide, so it's all good, right?

     I don't have a lot of time today, so this is gonna be the shortest post ever, but I just wanted to say something about this tendency that I've been seeing even more than normal this week. People are people with real feelings, and we remember the things we hear, no matter how they're packaged. Every life has value; we all have a divine purpose, and when God tells us--everyone--that He loves us and wants us to come home to Him, He's not jk.

I've posted this video before, but it's still one of my favorites: