Alison Bates
Retired pastor, mother, grandmother, perpetual student, allotment gardener.
Words
Words are everywhere. The arrival of the internet, social media and email produces a plethora of words. Some days I think that we are drowning in a sea of words, many of which are quite superfluous or worse, and here I am adding to them!
Having spent 32 years in church ministry I am retiring. Not sure what that means, everyone around me seems to have their own ideas about what I should be doing next. One thing I know is that writing is part of my future. Words are my calling. I hope that the words on this site will encourage, challenge, comfort and maybe inform. Maybe they will get lost, they are Little Words in a Big World, but hopefully they will do some good somewhere for someone.
Words are powerful. We know they have the power to create peace or incite war. They can encourage, they can guide and make significant change to our lives. We all know that they also wound.
Words are sticky. They get stuck in our heads and bad words are the stickiest. They get stuck more easily, and for longer, than good ones. Someone once said that we need to hear 10x the number of good words to overcome the bad one.
As a Christian the word of God is the most important book I read. If human words have power then divine words are serious business. The word of God is creative. It made the world; oceans, plains, mountains, and everything that crawls, swims, flies or walks upon it. The Bible tells us that the word is Jesus. The gospel of John tells us that he was there from the beginning, he is the answer to our ills, the power for creative living. He is the only one who can recreate our spirit and soul so that we have life. He said it, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life…’ (John 14:6)
I have tried over the last (nearly) 50 years to build my life on the Word. Left to myself I get lost in my own ideas, justify my own wrong behaviour or lose hope in tough times. I can’t claim to have always got it right, nobody, but Jesus, has ever done that, but I keep trying and would not want to live any other way.