Thoughts that come to me while completing English homework

 

I love words! I often think about words and languages. I’ve discovered words that I like and ones I don’t. I now know that I have an odd love for vowels, and I’m not very fond of consonants.  But think about words.

When I begin to think about them and how they are used, and about how words have opened us up to entire new worlds and ideas. They’re used to describe themselves and other things. Sometimes I think that words are one of God’s greatest creations, but no matter how complex they get, they also seem to be one of God’s simplest creations. They’re one of the simply sweet things in life that are able to pick you up and carry you off to bliss. These simple words with their logical structure are used to describe some of the most complex ideas out there like predestination, the creation of the world, the infiniteness of God, and the Trinity. All these things that we can’t wrap our minds around, we can’t wrap our words around.

They’re so amazingly simple that there are things we can’t apply them to. We can use them to describe our images; we can even put them in our images. We add them to our melodies to give them a certain message and meaning. But there will always be that thing in us, that wonderful thing that we can never apply our words to.

But that’s okay, words already do so much, they deserve a break! Look at how we mistreat them! We abbreviate them and misuse them in our text messages, chat sessions; it’s even made its way into our speech!

And I’m guilty of it too! I fully admit to my relentless beating and bashing of language. I can’t spell my way out of a box and my grammar is horrendous.

But I still love words. Look at a page of writing. Look at this page! See how the English language is written out? And every language has it to some extent- where it’s so linear. There is always some sort of line work going on in the writing.  Every sense of the physical written word is linear and geometric. Yet when you read it, it moves! It flows and curves to whatever it’s describing. The sounds that it makes are so fluid and beautiful when you speak it. A good poem is like a perfect sip of tea (or coffee) that’s just the right temperature. It has a magnificent taste and it warms every bit of your body as it makes it’s way down your throat.  

I love the way that Lewis Smedes talks about it…

            “I like the feel of language; I like the texture of it, the flow, especially when it flows leisurely and lovingly and elaborately through the eddies of memory.”

Even though you’re reading the lines, don’t you feel the ebbing of the language? Like it’s a soft tide washing up on shore, only to retreat back to the sea, and return again a moment later.

Language is truly a blessing and one of the greatest gifts we have been given as human beings. I love words!