I Caught Up!

  Whew...thanks for the pep talk earlier today, Tigerr. I did it, just like you said, and I am now on schedule.
  I think I'll call Fridays "Crazy Fridays" from now on, since I can't really write on Thursdays, since I'm gone practically all day.
  Anyway, good luck to all as we head into the weekend! Get some good words in! I have something for you to inspire you -- like a pep talk. I didn't write it, someone else did. (It was in a school assignment of mine last year.) I hope you enjoy!

Word Power.

 Words can amuse. They can delight.

Words can also manipulate, waffle and lie.

Words can persuade, and words can mislead.

Words can distract, and words can inspire.

Words can touch the heart, arouse to passion, and convict of truth.

Words can bring wonder, awe, comfort, forgiveness, bonding, certainty, understanding, insight and clarity.

They can also cause anger, distortion, confusion, ambiguity, embarrassment, separation and destruction.

Words convey power.

They can give life. And they can kill. They can tear down, and they can build up.

Words of Power are more than raw carriers of useful factoids. The danger of a high-tech education is that it can lead to a bleak wasteland, a splintered nation of ever-more isolated individuals clinging to ever-more narrow interests. 

Words can bring us together. Or drive us apart.

Remember the words of the old Gospel Hymn?

Memorable Words/ Efficacious Words/ “Wonderful Words of Life”

Beyond information, there should be thinking and stretching. That goes for you as well as for your readers. Writers need pauses, like blank pages, when we ponder and the pen stops or the keys cease clicking.

Silence. Stillness. Wonder.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, novelists and storytellers are best at articulating our dreams and hopes and prayers. They, at their best, interpret God and ourselves to us.

They inculcate our sense of wonder.

It is true that words alone or without substance are empty.

I believe we cannot communicate well without images and sounds and graphics and colors and visuals and motions. But alone these are never enough.

There are, after all, grave limitations to the powers of the lens and the tube and the chip. The fully dimensional human viewpoint cannot be matched by any machine. The human eye is still sharper than the eye of a television camera because it is linked to a brain and a heart. (Paraphrased from the late Saul Pett, an AP news features writer) 

For it is in the Power of Words that images are translated into meaning in our brains and hearts. And into change.

With God’s Words, we can speak volumes. We can even speak new worlds into existence, just as God did at Creation.

We can, tell stories. Our stories. And join them to the Great Glad News of His Story.

So don’t sound the Requiem for the Written Word.

No, not yet. For in the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word WAS God. This is the Power of God. Now and forever.

Go. Increase your Word power. Write Powerful Words! Wonderful words! Wonderful words of life! In an Age of Image.

Go! In the Power of God’s Word. 

Have fun, and go write words!

-President Fantasy