Workers in words, by Eve Lockett

Imagine this: human beings chipping away at stone slabs; pressing wedged sticks into soft clay and baking it; drawing on pottery shards with soot and oil; brushing vegetable and mineral dyes onto beaten papyrus reeds, inscribing stretched animal skins, scraped leaf thin; making wooden frames to flood with wax and scratch its surface with pointed sticks; pounding soaked rags and vegetable matter flat and then covering it in marks….

Imagine them forming messages in pictures, in symbols, in codes, creating alphabets to carry the sound of words, turning words into patterns. 

All that effort and energy so that human beings can speak their thoughts to one another.

And imagine vellum scrolls, exquisitely decorated, bound with embroidered cloth, rolled around carefully carved wood. Or paper sheets, folded and sewn together, then covered with painted boards, with jewelled cloth, with tooled metal or leather.

All that skill and care over creating beautiful ways for words to be kept.

And now imagine machines for pressing ink onto paper, the same words over and over again, sheet after sheet. Or machines carrying words in tiny electrical pulses travelling across the globe or into space.

All that invention and skill so that human words can be carried anywhere and everywhere, to anyone and everyone throughout the world.

Human beings are writers, makers, messengers. They breathe words and make words, and send them out into the world.

And now imagine this: words of such power they brought all creation into being, because they were spoken by God. Words making matter, making light, and bringing life. And then imagine God wanting so much to speak his words into the human heart that he sent one word into the world clothed in human flesh. A life lived, shared, given and destroyed. But the power of the word was so strong that death in turn was destroyed, and the word came back to life. And now that word is travelling out into the whole world, to the universe, to all human hearts. Christians believe the word has a name, Jesus. And the word is an invitation to receive life, and to know the heart of God.

What a privilege it is, to be a worker in words!