Words
Words, I love them – as must be obvious to regular readers of this leaflet! When I was about eight my Grandmother started me doing the Daily Telegraph crossword as she thought it would improve my spelling. She was an infant teacher in the early 1900s and was inclined to return one’s letters with the spellings corrected on the bottom. Now, if I see any word puzzle, crossword, codeword, word search, I have to do it. Numbers – bah. Sudoku you can keep but word games – try and stop me.
It has frequently been said that I could talk for England. My father maintained that I had been vaccinated with a gramophone needle rather than a hypodermic one. (For our younger members that would be equivalent to a record player stylus, but I am afraid it does not translate for CD players.) In my job I have learned to put people at their ease with inconsequential babble. I also need to be able to explain what is happening. I have acquired a lot of technospeak and can use all the latest buzzwords when necessary, but I hope I can also speak sincerely and appropriately, knowing when silence is actually golden.
Words are amazingly powerful things. We all know the expression “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me” but is that actually true? I understand from those involved in counselling that some of the worst damage done by warring spouses and to bullied schoolchildren involves verbal abuse, especially of the insidious kind. How many times do we see children, who have been told by their parents that they are useless, turn out to be just that? One in our own family has just failed her A levels having, since she started primary school, been told by her mother that she would. Jabez means pain, his mother called him that because she had a painful labour (no epidurals in those days!). Hardly his fault but we see how it has affected his whole life by what he prays (1Chron. 4:9-10).
In one of the less contentious verses of his Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam writes: “The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it”. How often have we wished we could take back something we have said? Another of my Grandmother’s sayings was “Least said soonest mended”. I have found that a very useful mantra. Life can be much easier if opinions are neither confirmed nor denied.
Part of a long poem by Rowland Sill goes:
“The ill-timed truth we might have kept –
Who knows how sharp it pierced and stung!
The word we had not sense to say –
Who knows how grandly it had rung!”
How true is that? How often do we think of something we should have said when it is too late? Whom have we unthinkingly and unknowingly distressed?
Words are powerful; God’s words are the most powerful of all & alone were responsible for all creation. He said, “let there be light” (Gen. 1:3) and there it was, likewise all the rest of everything. Later men, conversing in a common language, decided to make themselves important, by building, in Babel, the first skyscraper (Gen, 11:1-9). When God saw this presumption He upset their plans by making them speak different languages. The nuances of meanings vary so much from language to language. Look at the number of Greek words for love.
John 1:1-2 puts the importance of words beyond doubt – “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”. Our Lord Jesus Christ was the Word made flesh and He is our advocate and intercessor with the Father. He sits beside God and speaks, constantly speaks, if He ever stops speaking everything in the universe will cease to exist.
