Inspirational Spiritual Growth Article for
The Christian Woman
The Talking LeavesRemove the Filters ~ Open Our Eyes
My children and I read a book a few years ago entitled Ahyoka and the Talking Leaves. Story SummaryBased on a true story, in the 1850s a young Cherokee girl Ahyoka and her father Sequoyah wanted to make a written language for their people, just like the American English-speaking people had, because they believed that having a written language would help them to advance their people's lives. Their people rejected them for such a pursuit but they persevered anyway. They began drawing pictures for different words, but they soon realized that drawing pictures for words like anger or sorrow was really difficult and they wondered how they could draw pictures that everyone would understand. | The father bought a book with English words, and father and daughter tried to study this book. They looked at the pictures of snakes (s) and arrows (v) and moons (o) but simply couldn't understand why these types of pictures were on every page. They looked at words like do and thought, "What does that snail climbing up a reed next to the moon mean?" They worked for years trying to come up with a way to represent their words in a written form. One day Ahyoka heard the frogs and the birds and wondered how they communicated with one another. Soon she realized that they were communicating with sounds not pictures. She and her father began to sound out words they knew and realized that they could write down the sounds for each word rather than draw pictures of all the words. After this revelation, they invented a written language for their Cherokee people! | Personal Note The following book helped me identify images that bind women: |
Parallel to the Christian WalkI saw a parallel in this story to our Christian walks. In our Christian walks, the Holy Spirit gives us revelation about our "filters" and how they are hindering us from moving forward in our Christian walk. Some of those "filters" include |
