
"Just"
Lora Parsons
The Ashland Beacon
At some point over the last year, I’ve used two of the three words from this column’s title in the column. I figure it’s time now to get the last of them covered: JUST. It’s such an unassuming word when we use it in our everyday lives. It minimizes things. I’ll JUST run to the mailbox quickly. it won’t take long, won’t require much effort or energy. It’s a menial task that I’ll get off my to-do list in order to go on to bigger things. I’ll JUST have one cookie. It’s not a lot of calories or fat, and it won’t take me out of my goal to eat within a calorie deficit (if I had that goal). It’s a small, minor eating glitch that won’t really be enough to derail the healthy track I’ve been on. (Again, IF I had such a track.) “Just” minimizes things when we need to down-play them.
But that’s not all. This word has five different meanings, and one of those is very near an opposite to the minimizing nature of itself. I learned recently this means it’s a contranym. Like the word “dust,” which means to remove a powder-like substance from something that needs cleaned; but it also means to sprinkle something with a small amount of a powder-like substance. The word “strike” can mean both to hit something or to miss when trying to hit, as in baseball. One word, with opposite (not just multiple) meanings. “Just” means both to minimize the degree of something like the effect of just one cookie but also to be nearly an exact or full representation as in, “This is just the perfect fit.” Contranym.
There’s also another meaning of the word “just,” that we don’t throw around as often as these that we sprinkle throughout conversation: the sense of the word that recalls the requirement for right-ness. We want our court system to be just, to be fair, to recognize wrong and punish it according to the severity of the offense. We want the accused to have a chance to defend their actions, and we want victims of crimes to be avenged of the wrong committed against them. We love having a JUSTice system in place to be sure wrong is punished and right is upheld. In the natural world this offers us a sense of security and reassurance that all is going to be okay in the end even if it isn’t okay along the way.
When it comes to our spiritual walk regarding the idea of justice, we find ourselves thankful for the fact that our Just God is very opposite the idea of just God. He isn’t a thing to be minimized but the Almighty Creator of all that we experience. He isn’t JUST one fulfillment of a specific need we have at a specific time in our lives; He is all we need for every circumstance we face. Our Just God requires righteousness from us to be in His presence. But He knew that kind of perfection was beyond our ability to attain. He knew we were flawed and imperfect and that even in our best efforts to live as Jesus did, we would fail. His demand for justice-ness saw through our just-us-ness, and He knew He’d have to provide us a way back. He didn’t alter His requirement that we be sinless, but He provided us a way to get back to Him despite our shortcomings. Jesus became the way that our Just God could find favor with just humans and allow a broken world to step into the presence of His deity. The just-ness of the Father serves as a contranym to the just-ness of humanity, and Jesus bridges the gap to bring us home.
We’ve always told our kids “You can always come home” regardless of what you’ve done. It’s JUST a place of safety and forgiveness and acceptance regardless of what you might have done. JUST come home. Thankfully, Jesus wants the same of us. If you are JUST a mess of any sort, you can always JUST come home to His love.
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