Feeling a wee bit nostalgic at the moment.

I am typing from a school gym where Keona is participating in her first Speech & Debate tournament. Ah, the memories.

Moving annually as a child granted me the opportunity to be the perpetual new kid in school. Always new. Always different with clothes, hair, interests, and questions…consistently out-of-sync with my peers. My parents deep, sturdy love anchored my self-perception but I was clearly “not normal”–whatever normal’s ever-shifting definition may have been.

“Not normal” felt pretty benign until junior high.

Though at the time I sincerely believed God did not exist, He graciously gave me relief from the toxicity of teen rejection in three spaces: near my parents, at the piano, and with words. Privately, the latter manifested in countless hours delighting in unabridged dictionaries and an early love for journaling. Publicly, the latter manifested in speaking, writing, and drama.

Being here today brings the bright moments of those years back into focus.

I remember the thrill of receiving a topic for Extempt and weaving stats, logic, and story into persuasive arguments. I remember the joyous tension of performing my Humorous Interpretation or Original Oratory (my fav) and feeling like words were my home.

Decades later, my daughter and eldest son and I are back in a junior high gym.

We are reading the call sheets still taped on the walls and finding the rooms still changing with each rotation. While Keona is doing her skits and duos, Jonathan and I are working on his first book. Shoulder-to-shoulder we are brainstorming concepts, drawing idea webs, and considering what turns a story into a tragedy. He is dreaming through words, drawing in words, coloring with words.

Words.

They matter.

Words start things and stop things.

Words create things and destroy things.

We think of word as tools. Yet they shape us and the world around us.

So perhaps as I sit here in a room filled with words, my ache is for us to use them with care.

Sincerely.

Soberly.

With love.

Towards others? Yes.

And toward ourselves.

Jesus, the merciful and true Lover of our souls, is listening.