words

In the beginning was the Word...

A good job.

I love words! The written word, the spoken word, the fleshed out word. I love reading, listening, speaking, writing. Words.

As a sort of private discipline, I try and make sure I'm regularly reading something other than 'work-related' books. Reading not because I have to, but because I want to. Reading not just for profit, as it were, but for pleasure.

What I'm not so good at doing, however, is maintaining that same sort of discipline when it comes to creative writing. That is, writing that's not related to anything in particular. As in, writing that's not 'work-related'.

So at the start of the year I made a resolution that I'd do some more of that. Writing for pleasure and not because there's the pressure to write at all.

It's a good and useful discipline. And I set aside the morning today for simply that. It felt really quite exciting! Though it's hard to say just why!

It's a bit like the training a footballer does. He works with the ball. And the skills that are honed on the training ground like that will serve him well in the pressures and heat of the match.

My writing today was training ground stuff. Except it's words I'm caressing and not some bit of light, inflated leather.

I could happily have done that all day, of course! But tempting as it was, there were other things to do.

That included a call to one of the local hospitals. And a lady there who shares that same delight in words.

I sometimes wonder at the power of words.

The great, creative power of words. As in God's simple words at the very start, 'Let there be light' - and then there was light.

And the healing power of words as well. I remember how Edward Irving (I mean this was way, way before I was born, so when I say 'I remember', I'm meaning I remember reading about the guy!) went into a home where a young, little girl lay desperately ill: none of the doctors had managed to help her at all. And in went Edward Irving and all he did was take her hand and say three words and then go out.

'Jesus loves you.'

That's all he said. But healing power was in those words. And hardly was he out the door than she was right behind him. On her feet and right as rain. Healed.

Words. In the beginning was the Word. And in him, the Word, was life.

Like a footballer out on the training ground, perfecting his skills in such a way that, come the match, the guy can make that ball do simply stunning things - like him, I'm likewise working with words, learning just how I can somehow fill these words with him who is himself the Word.

And thereby, too, release that healing power.

(The picture at the top, by the way, forms the front of the Gospel of St John in the Book of Kells)