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.