bleeding out loud

There are a handful of people-friends, speakers, and writers-who have dramatically shaped how I have come to understand the world.

Mark Baas. Steve Weber. Matt Krick. Rob Bell. Walter Brueggemann. Lawrence Kushner. Phyllis Tickle. Abraham Joshua Heschel. Eugene Peterson. Henri Nouwen. NT Wright. Frederick Buechner, and my wife, who on more than one occasion has offered prophetic insight in the form of what she calls a “newsflash.” These are intensely truthful and rarely pleasant.

All of these people share one thing in common: The power of words.

In Hebrew davar means word, but it also means event-which is to say that words are eventful. They make things happen. As Brueggemann says, “Our words create our worlds.” So in Genesis 1, God speaks and a world is created. Words have the capacity to get inside your bloodstream and bounce around inside you for days, weeks, and months on end, sometimes even a lifetime.

Words are powerful in that they have the capacity to create life and to destroy it. A few years ago I did a sermon on words from the book of James. James talks about the tongue being a great evil. “The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.” I bet James cursed like a sailor.

But the description got me to thinking about the phrase linguistic napalm, the power of words to explode in life giving or life taking ways. I asked a few people what they thought of the phrase and one particularly genius woman said, “It makes me think of inflammatory words that leave lasting scars.” An apt description.

I put experiments in linguistic napalm as the sub-title of this blog, because sub-titles seem to attract publishers (just kidding, but seriously they do). It’s the sub-title of the blog because I hope to subvert the phrase for life giving purposes, to speak and to write words that create worlds, words that get on people and leave lasting marks.