Think about all the conversations you have in a day and the people you have them with everyday. We have conversations about the weather and our plans for the day. We give someone a compliment and we use our cell phones to share our news or to "check in" with our loved ones. Our conversations can help improve a difficult situation for the better. We use words to help us to express our needs, or our sympathy and our care for someone. A few sentences can start a war or move a whole country toward peace. Hallmark has built an entire industry using and arranging words to uplift, console, celebrate, and inspire people. Facebook couldn't exist without using words and sentences. Twitter is pointless without words. Think of how excited a mother is, when she first hears the word "mama" and then she hears a few more words, and finally the thrill of hearing her child able to express herself in sentences.
Our ability to communicate, and our ability to choose the words we use to communicate, is our divine inheritance. All of our power lies in "the word", both spoken, written, heard, and expressed through sign language, braille, heiroglyphics, and so many other ways. Think about the person who receives word that a loved one has passed away. With a spoken sentence, their life is changed forever. Think about the woman who is waiting to tell her husband that she is pregnant for the first time. Now there is a life-changing sentence!
And she probably thought, planned, and dreamed of how she would communicate that to her husband and the rest of her family and friends. And then there is the weatherman who uses words to tell us of how beautiful or stormy the weather is going to be that day. A doctor who speaks the words, "It's not cancer" has just changed how that person is going to view his life and what he does with it from this point on. The power of the spoken word has its origin in God's desire to love and create out of love. The spoken word takes center stage in the story of creation, from Genesis all the way through the New Testament.
The angel Gabriel used words to announce to Mary that she would be the mother of the Christ child, and those words resulted in a baby boy named Jesus. "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us!" Jesus was a thought in God's mind, then a word, then a real live human being whose words have changed millions of people. It was the words, "Crucify Him!" that put him on the cross and it was the words "He is risen!" that changed our view of death forever. Samuel woke up one night to hear his name, a simple word, "Samuel!" And he responded with the words, "Speak, Lord, your servant is listening!" Responses follow the words we speak, just as Samuel finally responded to his name being called with the heart of a servant. The book of Genesis is really the book that lays the whole foundation for the power of the spoken word. It is the story of creation, and creation started with the thoughts of God. Those thoughts were put out into the world through the use of the spoken word, and that word was followed by a physical manifestation of what God spoke: Then God said, "Let there be Light!" and there was light! Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth every kind of plant that bears seed and every kind of fruit tree that bears fruit. And so it happened.
And so it continues to happen with us, in this moment. Our thoughts, which eventually take the form of words, have the ability to create. We were made in the image of God, and our image was first a thought in God's mind, that eventually was spoken, and well, here we all are. Our lives are God's Word. Because we were made in God's image, our thoughts are God's divine guidance thinking through us, and it only stands to reason that what we speak has to originate from our minds, where we are inspired either by fear or love. Depending on whether we are coming from a place of love or fear, will determine what words we will choose, and those are the words we will speak, which in turn either create more love or fear. Let's look at an example from an ordinary event from our own lives.
In my role as a mother, my words hold a lot of power, or so I'd like to think! Let's say you tell your little boy that he needs to stay away from the watering hose in back of the house. It is your thought that wants to keep him safe, dry, and out of trouble, so you use your words to tell him what you would like him to do. Of course you warn him sternly, and yet... yep, you guessed it, he decides to defy your warning and plays with the garden hose anyway. Now, you're going to have to choose words to let him know that he has made a bad choice. Some parents will scold him and put him in timeout. Some might actually yell and then spank him. Some will simply tell him he's made a bad choice and then use words to let him know what the consequence is going to be. The way we use our words, and how we say them, are going to have an impact. The parent who comes from a place of fear might literally tell him how stupid he is and asks what was he thinking and then sends him to his room. The parent that comes from love, asks him to go to timeout and asks him to think about what he has done, and then is asked to apologize and loses his privilege to run through the sprinkler since he decided to mess with the garden hose. The boy approaches the mother with an explanation of what he did wrong, apologizes, and then the mother forgives him and tells him she loves him, but she doesn't always like the choices he makes. Words can make all the difference. They either create more love and expand the power of love or they create and expand fear. The boy that was told, with words, he was stupid isn't going to forget that, and if he hears that word enough, he is going to start to believe he is stupid, and then what happens, he continues to do "stupid" things. He feels he will never make the right choices because of a choice of words that were spoken about him. In the other scenario, the words the mother chooses still makes him feel loved and accepted, and even more important, valued, even though he made a mistake.
Think about famous speeches that you remember. Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech made a huge impact on the world and the creation of the civil right's movement. They were simply thoughts that formed words written down on paper, but what they caused people to feel and do reflects God's activity in the world and the creation of a society where all people would be treated as equal. Some sentences written down on paper and spoken with desire, passion, conviction, and most importantly love, changed our world.
Now let's go in the opposite direction. Adolph Hitler. He used words to convince people that a whole segment of the human race should be destroyed and removed from existence. He had thoughts that he put into words, and sent the energy of prejudice, hatred, and fear out into the world. His creation, and other people's loyalty and compliance with his words was the Holocaust.
It is important to remember that our words are always creating. In order to speak words, we have to think them first. Sometimes we're aware of the thoughts we have before we say something, and other times we are very unaware that what we felt and thought preceded the words we were about to speak, and what follows is the creation of the thought and word, good or bad. And this is why we pray. Praying, especially, in the morning, aligns our thinking and feeling with God. Time spent in Silence is really where our thinking is cleansed and refined. It is Silence where our minds are opened and prepared to receive the thoughts and dreams of God. It is Silence where the real transformation of our thinking releases a light upon our world. When our thinking and feeling is aligned with God, the conversations we have throughout our day are filled with Spirit and light. God's activity is made visible, both by what we say and what we don't say. Have you ever been in a situation where you weren't sure what you were going to say, but you trusted that the right words would come, and the right creation would result? That is why affirmations are so powerful. They are words that affirm the creation you want to see. If you tell yourself you're going to fail the math exam, you probably will. But if you tell yourself you are going to do your very best on your math exam and that you will pass with flying colors, you will. If you convince yourself you are going to get sick the minute the flu season hits, you'll probably get sick. If you think thoughts of health and say them in an affirmation, you probably won't get sick. It is so easy to take the creation of our words for granted. The words we form into sentences and speak send forth a burst of divine energy out into the world. Every syllable of every word vibrates with the force of the miraculous. Miracles of every size, shape, and color are born from the higher realms of our thinking and take shape and form in the space of our lives.
The power I hold as a mother, when I think about all I say in a day to my children, is quite humbling. The answers I give to their questions, the encouragement I give them when they are trying something new for the first time, or my impatience is all creating an experience for them. The hesitancy in my voice or the confidence in my voice can impact how they see the world. Think about the child who tries to say a swear word for the first time. Do you respond intently and lend power to that word, or do you ignore it and deflate its power and hope you never hear it again? Kids are constantly trying out the power of words and their vocabularies are constantly expanding. They are always trying to figure out the power words hold and the responses they get when they try them out. We too, need to become like children, and become more curious, attentive, and alert to what we say and how we are saying it. Our thoughts are unspoken words, but even the thoughts we think about ourselves are powerful and are always creating. Our thoughts and our words are prayers of creation. It is our thoughts and our words that separate us from the rest of creation, and give us dominion over all of creation. Our thoughts and our words make us co-creators in the sense that it is God who thinks through us and speaks through us, and therefore creates through us.
Take some time at the end of a day, and go over the conversations you had. Think about why you said what you said. Identify the feelings behind the words you chose. Reflect on what you created that day because of the words you chose, or didn't choose to say. It is our conversations where God loves, uplifts, forgives, encourages, inspires, and expresses Himself to the rest of the world. Because we believe in a loving, merciful, and compassionate God, our thoughts, that eventually become words, spoken and unspoken, must also be loving, merciful, and compassionate. Listening to God in prayer is infinitely more valuable than any other prayer we could make. Listening to God invites the illumination of our minds, connects every feeling with a thought, connects every thought with a word, and ultimately causes heaven to embrace earth, causes mountains to move, and changes water to wine.
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