Best...(My own) Words.

Since I read those blogs I posted yesterday I cant get the thought about words out of head.

How big and huge and important they are. How they impact us daily. Every hour second of every minute of hour of day of week of...

Words are huge.

Like in the Anne Jackson blog-it close to home for me because I got teased in Elemantary school.
Somedays Im still not sure why.
I mean I was this little nerdy girl with glasses who hung out with either guys or nobdy 90% of the time. And then I have this kind of infamous last name. It didnt help that while I was in Elemantary school this ketchup brand that my last name is close to came out with new brands of Ketchup providing much more nicknames for me.

Point is, I know how words can hurt. Heck. I taught about in Kids church just this much. How the "Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me" phrase isnt always true.

And that stuff when I was a kid. It doesnt hurt me now. I can for the most part brush it off.
But when you're 9, 10..and hitting puberty before anybody else?
Yea. I can safely say it impacted me.

But I know the good of words too.

I know, many times over, how it feels or what happens when you listen to a song and your heart responds to every line.
I know what happens when you go to church and pray and break down because the pastor or someone praying said a word or phrase that you needed to hear, that God wanted you to be there to hear it that day.

Words are big-receiving and giving. Having a little brother, Ive learned when I go far.
Having friends who are girls-Ive learned it.
In middle school, I started to loathe drama and realized painfully in High School how it was created by spoken rumors just spun out of control-and of course spoken by word of mouth over and over and over.

But its not like we can close our ears to not words, not close our mouths to not say them. It is an essential human thing.

Jon foreman wrote how when you say word and an image comes to mind, it is a placeholder.

If I said brownie-is it not an image of your favorite kind in your head? Not the word itself?

Maybe Im finding the writer in myself but Jon's paragraph struck me so deep and true.

I don't write songs when I'm happy. When I'm content, I take my wife out to dinner, I go surfing. I hang out with my friends and play ridiculous cover tunes when I'm happy. But when I'm depressed, I turn to look for something beyond this life. When I'm lonely and nothing makes sense and the world has lost it's flavor I search for notes and words that usher in a transcendence that soars high above the tragedy. I look for to song to understand the present tragedy in the context of a hope for a better world. I look for words that remind me of a bigger story, for songs that acknowledge the tragedy and move beyond it. I look to artists who give me windows, words that provide for a new life to be birthed within me.

Is it escape? Is it a coping mechanism? Maybe a bit, but I feel that it is much more than that. The song becomes a hopeful defiance. A declaration that the injustices and absurdities of our postmodern existence are not the final downbeat. Music becomes a confession of disbelief in the world that surrounds me. A refusal to believe that these tragedies and horrors are the ultimate end. A refusal to accept the oppression of the Dalit's as anything other than tragic. A nonacceptance that the starving six year old is anything other than tragic. The song is written in defense of a world beyond this one, in defense of Truths that seldom make it to the front page of the newspaper. Words create worlds.

I bolded out what hit me most.

Words are so big. We need to eb careful how we use them. The world needs it. We need it. You AND me.