Words

April 10, 2010

It’s quite gratifying being told I ought to publish my nightly musings. My friend Jeff admonished me thusly a few weeks ago. Fellow scribblers in our Friday morning writers’ group have tried for a couple years to get me to do something more substantial with my thoughts, to little avail. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to do it, but writing takes time, editing takes even more, and I’m feeling quite pressed already, preparing sermons, doing the pastoral work I can’t seem to shake. I’ve never been a hard-driving, high energy person, and the older I get the slower I go. Give me a couple more years and I’ll be in full Rev.—reverse, not reverend.

I’m not so naive nor arrogant to imagine everything I write has value. If I were to go through the past five years of writing, I’d be hard pressed to collect enough for a pamphlet, let alone a book. Perhaps someday, but I’d need to print out five years’ worth of words, sentences, and paragraphs, before digging through them for whatever nuggets that may somehow lie therein. Where is an editor when you need one? 

Words are tools. Like my son’s knives, they must be sharpened and polished so they can both cut and flash in the light as they are wielded with skill and power. For someone like myself, there is a particular satisfaction in finding just the right word or phrase that catches the imagination, setting it ablaze with insight and vision heretofore imprisoned within the soul, unable to speak the language of the heart. Seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary is my delight, and tonight I am thankful to be able to think, and to express my thoughts with words I have made serve me sometimes willingly and sometimes reluctantly, but as often as I am able, well...ably.