Tupos

Today, I’m going to tell you all about tupos. Unfortunately, my brain is not running well enough this evening to come up with some kind of entertaining or even semi-intelligent introductory statement, so that’s going to have to do . . .

Anyways, tupos. It’s a Greek word meaning “impact,” and one of my favorite words.  When a blacksmith would work at his forge and make a breastplate, he would start out with something that looked nothing like a breastplate, but he would strike again and again with his hammer, each blow leaving a tupos in the metal, a concave impact mark. Eventually, he would have the final product, drastically different from the flat piece with which he started.

Now, there is a twofold message to be found here. The first is obvious: God is the blacksmith, and He uses His tools to shape us into the final product He planned for us to be. The tools are the various trials we run into in this life. Pretty deep analogy, huh? Yeah, I didn’t think so either.

The second analogy is what really hit me while thinking about tupos. It’s a fact that ever y contact we have with another person affects us. The degree to which each encounter affects us varies greatly, but each meeting nonetheless. affects who we are and who we develop into. Even if you just meet someone once, they have contributed to your steriotypes and preconceptions or your social skills and thought patterns. And we have the same affect on others. This is our tupos, our impact on another person’s life. And we control what that tupos entails, whether it is a good one or bad. Is it a tupos Jesus would be proud of you for leaving, or is it just like everyone else’s? That’s what we need to be thinking about. You have twenty seconds in some other person’s life. How is that tiny period going to affect them?

 

-In Christ,

Phil