Souls made of Words - by Liz Carter

I sometimes think about words and get completely blown away.

It's pretty much impossible to come to an exact number of words in the English language. The Oxford Dictionary estimates that we have 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. But we can't know exactly how many words we have - for example, do we count 'dog' as one word or one of a few - it can be a verb as well as a noun, after all, and that's before we start with plurals and tenses.

However many, what strikes me is that we as humans are able to express ourselves in such a crazy multitude of ways. We don't just like something; we admire, we love, we adore, we cherish, we relish, we prize. (And that last isn't just a verb, either!) Our ability to convey such depths of emotion and describe our thoughts is unique to us as the human race, created for so much more than survival. We're created for beauty and awe, for relationship expressed in a million ways. I love that we have words, and that our words are more than practical tools for communication. They pull out our greatest yearnings and our deepest secrets, they fly free with the things we cannot always say aloud and yet need to say somewhere. As writers, we are so privileged to be entrusted with gifts to unlock more of these words and rivers of words; we are enthused and enlivened by drawing out truths and shadows of truths, by evoking mysteries, by plundering depths and soaring on heights. We unravel layers upon layers of meanings and build them up again in different ways. We create poems and songs, story and epistle, and in all of these things we tap into the great creativity of the One who thought it all up.

I mean, think about it. God could have made people to live their lives with no nuance or conception of more than there seems to be. We could have been less than we are, with no capacity to cry out depths or scream out mountaintops. A few words would do; enough to get by, to buy and sell, to survive and reproduce. We'd not understand much of pleasure or even pain, and our lives would be lived without shadows. But God created us with souls made of words. Souls that explode with transcendence, that create and construct and discover and shape and burst with a billion meanings. We could say things in a few words but instead we delight in metaphor, simile, hyperbole, irony, alliteration, and imagery.

Romans 1:20 says: 'For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.' We often take this to mean what can be seen in nature, and the beauty around us. But I think it's in words, too. I think God's invisible and eternal qualities are poured into language and so enable us to express - even if through a glass darkly - something of this. The majesty of words is what has placed that enticing call on us as writers and readers, a call to understand more of who God is and to lay out the deep truths of who God is.

Today, if you are feeling less than, if you are without resources, if you are feeling a lack of words, I want to encourage you to tap in once again to the source of it all. To wonder once again at the sheer genius of the human ability to spin words into more than a mundane tool for communication, and to marvel at your place in this great gift.

To thank God for your soul made of words.


Liz Carter is an author and blogger who writes about the painful times of life and how to discover God at work in the depths as well as the heights. Her first book, Catching Contentment, was published in 2018 and explores how we can find contentment in God when things are less than ideal.