“For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Jesus Christ.” Philippians 1:8

I have to be so careful with my texting. If I actually sent the things that I often write, due to clumsy thumbs and auto-correct, it would be horrible. Two examples of this come to mind. One happened years ago when we were watching our pastor’s daughter while he and his wife were on a trip. Their daughter was missing them and wanted to talk to them, so I texted our pastor and said, “Your sweet girl is missing you dearly.” That’s what I wanted to say but due to the above reasons, ‘dearly’ showed up as ‘diarrhea.’ “Your sweet girl is missing your diarrhea.” Oh my goodness… by God’s grace the Lord intervened and I saw that word and was able to correct it. The whole thing brought levity when it was needed. I am actually laughing thinking back on it now.

The other time happened when I was commenting from my phone on someone’s Facebook post about how pretty they looked. This girl was a photographer, always taking photos of other people. One day she posted a picture of herself and I commented, “You look so pretty.” But what I actually sent, due to the same reasons above was, “You look so plumpy.” Wait, what? This girl was about 15 at the time. She was the farthest thing from plumpy. This was in the days where you couldn’t edit comments, so I actually called her mother and told her what happened. She said, “Heather, only to you.” O dear, that is so true.

My children all tell me that I am also an unemotional texter; that I don’t put enough emojis in my texting and that they all have to decipher whether my “yes” to something is a happy ‘yes’ or an angry ‘yes.’ So, I have been trying to be mindful of adding a bit more pizazz to my texting. I am not perfect at this and as recently as this last weekend I had a major texting fail due to my lack of emoji emotion aka my lack of affection. I had texted a response to one of my son’s on a group text and said, “Oh, OK, I didn’t know that.” In my mind I said it with joy and gladness but he read it as if I was being snarky and mad. Why? Because it lacked affection which is the exact opposite of how I feel about this precious son of mine.

I have decided, once again, that texting is the absolute worst form of communication. It’s useful for grocery lists and that’s about it. Texting rarely demonstrates how I “yearn for others,” especially my husband and children, “with the affection of Jesus Christ.”

In person, phone, or letter is the way to go for me. But if I have to, I must add lots of emoji affection.

Blessings to you,

Heather

One more funny thing….my grandson told me recently that his favorite emoji is the poop emoji. He didn’t say the word poop. He just pointed to it on my phone and told me it was his favorite. I was shocked. I asked him why. He said, “I love chocolate ice cream.” He thought the poop emoji was chocolate swirl ice cream. Isn’t that the cutest?