Life - Word Love

My love story with words has been a long, gradual one. Sometimes it's frozen me and I haven't been able to write anything, sometimes it's freed me to try bizarre ideas, some which flopped infamously, others that failed a little less. :-) It has been a gift to become more conscious of the art and beauty in lines, sentences, and paragraphs. Somehow, I want to keep reading poetry, underlining amazing things, studying Latin, reading aloud, pirating the dictionary, and memorizing and studying all those crazy things which come wrapped in language. I don't know how to wield something so big as a word, but I want to try.

Most of all, I am speechlessly grateful and amazed for the Bible. I am so clumsy and ignorant with such a gift. What a blessing each of us have—the full portrait of Christ in Living Words. We can pick it up anywhere and at anytime and we have hundreds of wise, encouraging, exciting books from dedicated saints who gave their lives to study and live now and in the past. All of this—and still, I fail to enjoy, be fed by, and depend on the Word of God in my daily life. How can I be one of God's little words, incarnate in the world, if I do not know the model I am fashioned after or the character of my Creator?

Unbelievably, my God is a God of mercy, who still changes and satisfies me when I finally go to His Word and see He has been driving me there this whole time. May our lives be truly dedicated to the best gift of all—the true Word. Life. 

The Best - Word Love

I do not think anything can make us more in love with words than the Bible. Dig into the living Word and suddenly language becomes so beautiful and powerful, we realize we need more than the rest of our lives to begin to understand it. 

Something that I've heard a lot of different ways suddenly came to a head in a remark I heard in a sermon from Tullian Tchividjian. What the Bible says, and how it says it, reflect and build off one another. He was talking about Colossians. The first section is about what God has done for us and the second on what that means about how we should live. We can see this in all of the Apostle Paul's epistles. The physical definitions of the words say that God initiated and changed us first--but so does the actual structure. We can see this all over the place in other structures and chiasms. Sometimes words are flat on paper, but with study we can seem them in 3D. I wonder what they'll look like when we can really see them.

The Bible is packed. God didn't give us a book we can read, put under our belt, and move on from. He also didn't give us something to crack our heads on. He wants us to read, but not just because we need to prove our commitment and daily acknowledge our need for Him. Instead, He gave us something that takes time, research, and study because He loves us so much that He wanted to give us the greatest gift of all—a lifelong, growing relationship with The Word. An endless gift of beauty, knowledge, and life. The gift that continually gives.

By The Word and through The Word, all things are being held together. When God speaks, physical things come into an existence. We are words He spoke, and His speaking is continually creating us and writing our lives. But this Author is also outrageously involved and generous to His characters. He turns around and hands us this powerful thing we call language and says, now you try.

Underlining - Word Love

The next chapter was my mountainous internal struggle with underlining. I am a purist and I also believe authors are frequently treated like dirt. Reading the end of the book is judging without a hearing. Singing music while you read is yelling while someone is trying to talk to you. And underlining is making something stand out the writer chose not to put in all caps, bold, or italic. Marring the pages with your own notes is distracting and doesn't allow you to hear the author's whole thought. You know, these sorts of convictions. So my reading system for several years was reading a book straight through then going back a second time to write out quotes and notes. If a book was worth reading once, it was worth reading twice.

My first leap of conscious occurred in desperation. I'm a painfully slow reader and had about seven books lined up for notes and several shelves full of books that hadn't been cracked yet. I started a book I needed to complete, start to finish, in a week. I should have, but I didn't have any respect for the particular author and so I closed my eyes and made the first incision. I began to underline with a big, bold pen. I realized it made me pay attention to word arrangement and train of thought in new ways. Taking notes became entirely different somehow and suddenly I was aware of the author's word choice and order, both in areas that were aggravating and thrilling.

There are still some books that should be committed to memory and untouched, others where post-it tabs are vital, but many books are best served and used with respectful, careful underlining. Sometimes I even write questions and notes in the margins.

I wonder how much more I would have learned if I'd given in sooner... Most of the time being a purest and perfectionist is an excuse not to learn or use something for its proper purpose.

Poetry - Word Love

I started a post a long time ago about words and how much I'd been learning about our mutual feelings for one another. Now I feel like the relationship has become far more serious. In fact, I think it will be a love affair that will take a lifetime, and even at the end (or will it be the beginning?), we might not really know each other.

I used to think I loved writing and books. It was true, but in a quest to make myself fall in love with poetry, I realized I'd really enjoyed the stories and ideas. I hadn't actually been listening all that closely. Poetry was a discipline at first, but soon it became a rampant obsession. Perhaps the quickest way to become intimate with words is through analyzing, editing, and writing poetry. And so I took the leap. :-)

John Donne shoulders great responsibility for my quick spiral in the last four years...but he led to other discoveries. I'm not sure how interesting or helpful it will be, but for the next bit I hope to post some of what people have been patiently teaching me about words. Please feel free to contribute and comment on things you've learned or wisdom that comes to mind.