Dying of words
I’ve noticed an alarming trend in ministry with college students: they use words better in technological media than in person. Emails, text messages and even facebook.com posts are often thoughtful, eloquent and witty. But one-on-one, the same students and I will stammer about, our words bumping into one another in mid-air. Awkward silences that don’t exist in cyberspace intrude on our communication.
Rick Lischer, Eugene Peterson and others have suggested our culture is drowning in words, our lives so bombarded by wordiness that words are losing their meaning, and losing their ability to connect us to one another. Stephen Colbert famously calls this phenomenon truthiness: words in a word-infested culture can mean whatever we feel they should mean (His hilarious commentary on this is worth a look).
When we casually toss words around, using them crassly and carelessly, we rob them of their power to create and reconcile. But in the midst of a wordy culture we still believe in a God who speaks, who creates the cosmos, life, dust, breath, humanity by using words.
