It’s been a couple of days since I have written and posted anything here.  I guess the silence has been useful to let me know that at least two people read these posts.  It’s always encouraging to hear back from friends that they miss your posts.  Encouragement to write is always well received.

For me, it is often a question of what to write, and if what I think I should write is worthwhile or not.  My mind tends to follow the same ruts each day.  I walk a similar path in my life, following a pretty regular routine each work day as I get up, think my morning thoughts, get assembled for public consumption, and head out the door.

Once I am at work, I am caught on a teeter-totter of production versus inspiration.  I work on web products, and so much of my day- much of my life, for that matter- is spent on the web.  Looking for solutions to work questions related to coding.  Looking for solutions to life questions related to doing and being.

And then after work, it’s either off for home to try and accomplish some nameless, low impact task for the evening, off to a dance class or a dance event because it is a hobby and a social outlet, or off to a Bible study or church event, because my heart starves for spiritual food.  Throw in an occasional basketball game to watch or movie to see or event to attend, and you get what my week is like.  Not too intense, not too crazy.  And at times, not as productive as I’d like it to be.

Luckily, you also cannot get too far behind the scenes to see the quarky, inappropriate, and dread-filled places my mind often goes.

I laud my faith highly, and I do so not because it puts me on a pedestal and declares me perfect and praiseworthy, warranting admiration and adulation from others.  No, I laud my faith pretty highly, but I do that because in the faith part of it, I find comfort, encouragment  and power in the bridge between my fickle heart and the God revealed in Scripture, whose words have been carefully recorded and translated and transcribed and shared by other men like myself, who have had fickle hearts, and who themselves at some point in their lives waded out into the Scriptures, and in them found life and courage and strength.

I laud this faith pretty highly because, for all of the caricatures people try to give the God of the Bible, when you take Him seriously and strive to meet Him and sit with a naked soul before Him, you discover that Noah’s God, who flooded the earth in sad capitulation, and  Abraham’s God, who crystallized Sodom and Gomorrah in judgment, and Moses’ God, who parted the Red Sea for the fleeing Israelites and drowned the army of Egypt, and Elijah’s God, who poured lava from the sky on the priests and altars of Baal- you discover that this God is the God who in the end looked at His creation, broken and blemished, and ultimately said “How can I help you?”

I laud my faith because in it I have found He who has resolved to never quit asking, “How can I help you?”

Funny how this post started by thinking about words, about writing, and about the writer’s quest to be meaningful, to say worthwhile things.  And here I am, writing about God, who is called “the Word” in the New Testament- the Word who came to help us.

I suspect God is called “the Word” in the New Testament because fundamentally, words matter.  It is through words that you and I come to understand and to analyze and to share and to categorize our lives.  And it is by our words, others come to know us.  Words are vehicles for reason, and provide us with an architecture for understanding and making sense of our lives.  I suspect God is “the Word” in the Gospels because He is subtly trying to tell us, with our advanced intelligence, that He is the Reason behind our reasoning, and the Framework behind our frameworks- and the Poetry behind our poetry.  And I reckon that in His identification of being “the Word”, He was saying that He would continue to speak into our lives and to uphold our connection to Him.  Hidden in that declaration is that when words are absent, lives devolve into chaos, communities and companies collapse, and relationships falter and die.

I was reminded of that this weekend, when a few friends said, “Hey- I haven’t seen you post anything lately.”

Words matter, even if they are used mundanely, or sparingly, and are necessary for keeping lives together.  After all, in Biblical parlance, they were originally they agents of creation, connection, and communion.  Agents for healing, helping, and hope.