Whatever
In her column “I Wish I’d Said That,” Maggie Chandler recently wrote about the meaning of the word Amen . The meaning of the word is along the lines of “let it be so” or “so be it.” She told how she asked her Sunday school class about its meaning and her daughter responded, “whatever.” I could have thought at about the meaning of that word for a long time and not have come up with that answer. Along the same lines that Maggie took with what she said, we take the whatever to be a somewhat disrespectful term. It implies that a teenager is telling a parent, “I don’t agree with you. I know you won’t listen well enough to understand, but I’ll yield to you. Whatever.” But the parent is thinking, “why can’t she just accept that I know better than her?” When we look at the Lord’s prayer in the garden, isn’t that how he ended it? Doesn’t “not my will, but thine be done” mean exactly the same thing as whatever ? Jesus may have been more sincere, but the meaning’s the same. To so the question fo...