The Power of Words
"Utilizing the right words to describe the pain points of your current reality, your 'now,' your life’s or organization’s 'now,' is just as critical a step in moving forward as creating language to describe a preferred future."
Words brand. Like it or not, every word, every text, every email, or post emanating from your fingertips is creating your brand—the way the world sees you and thinks about you.
Words are dangerous. They can be your best friends or your worst enemies. They hold the power of genesis and destruction. They have the power to create possibilities, to transform current realities into desired futures.
Nothing exists outside of language. With words to convey meaning and create the distinction between things, there is a way to parse reality. This is this. This is not that.
You don’t have to know how to write a whole paper or book. You just have to start with one good sentence. And then go one sentence at a time.
When presented in the right sequence and weighted with the proper energy, a surprisingly concise progression of ideas you present can move any reader, any audience, and even the world toward an entirely new reality--a reality they want but didn’t (until now) have the words to conceptualize.
Words drive change. Utilizing the right words to describe the pain points of your current reality, your “now,” your life’s or organization’s “now,” is just as critical a step in moving forward as creating language to describe a preferred future.
Good counselors help us discover the right way to describe the complexities of what we are feeling—the amorphous barrage of thoughts, attitudes, and assumptions dogging us because they are bouncing around in random, wordless obscurity. Then we can find the right language—the right words—to describe a new and different state of being, a healthier one, a brighter one, a more balanced one, and courageously begin to move toward it...eventually into it.
God loves words
I believe in the power of words. We are told God created the cosmos—not by waving a hand, not by snapping fingers, but by speaking. This is a significant idea.
Though God communicates to us, his human creatures in many various ways, God most clearly and primarily does so through the medium of the written word. We read words given to us from God, through a millennia-old chorus of faithful women and men who served as witnesses to God's written revelation. And we try to understand them.
The Holy Spirit has been promised to give us insight as we do so. In the reformed tradition, the reformers used a Greek word to give account of this. The word is autopistas—how the scriptures are self-actualized, legitimized, even individualized to the reader through the Spirit's work as he or she reads them. I have experienced this miracle of communication in my own life.
Jesus was called “The Word” who was with God at creation and is God. Precept is an organization that understands the power of words—words providing an avenue for God’s Word to engage people at the heart-level, words leveraging powerful ideas, words connecting the circumstances of reader's personal life to a higher source of truth.
Ifugao
I believe people are transformed by seeking relationship with their creator. The most effective way to understand what God loves, what God expects, and how God interacts with us is through engagement with His Word.
A few years ago, my family had the privelage of being in a remote village in Northern Luzon, Philippines when the first existing Bible in the Ifugao langauge was presented, printed and bound, to the Ifugao people by Wycliffe missionaries. Teams had been working on the translation for two generations. I can’t describe the impact it had on me to see Ifugao people, from tribal leaders to little children, clutching the Word of God, in their native language, in their arms with tears in their eyes.
