There's a word missing from the Mangelsdorf family dictionary. A word that, more often than not, invades sentences as a verb. In childhood, its direct object may be an unwelcome green vegetable, or the book report due on Friday. But according to the Mangelsdorfs, there's nothing innocuous about using the word hate.
For parents Ron and Katie of Palmer, Alaska, the conscious decision to remove hate from the family vocabulary wasn't so much about communicating that hatred is a strong word as it was about offering a new model for thoughts and behavior, shifting to a different paradigm.
As Christian Scientists, the Mangelsdorfs are accustomed to making this kind of paradigm-shift. Starting from the standpoint that God, divine Love, is the All and Only—no matter what human circumstances say to the contrary—is, after all, the basis for healing. So cultivating their hate-free lexicon has meant taking this fundamental understanding of the allness of Love into their daily life and conversation—right down to the verbs and nouns they chose to use.
