The Power of Words
A belief does not stay where a man keeps it. It leaves the house every time he opens his mouth, and it comes back having been somewhere.
He was fifty-one and had owned the shop for nineteen years when he saw the old man at the pharmacy counter, waiting on a prescription, eighty if he was a day. Duane. His first boss. He had carried Duane's bucket for two summers at nineteen, and in the second summer, under a house on Elm Street with the man's flashlight in his teeth, Duane had said nine words to him that he had never repeated to anyone. "You see it before you cut it. Most don't."
He had built a trade on those nine words. He had taken them into the licensing exam and into the first bid he ever won and into the morning he hired his first man. He crossed the pharmacy and said his name, and the old man's face did the thing old faces do, and then it cleared, and Duane was glad to see him and asked about the shop. So he told him. He told him about the sentence under the house on Elm. He wanted the old man to have it back.
Duane had no memory of saying it. None. He was not being modest. He had said it to a boy under a house and gone on to the next fitting and never thought of it again, and he was embarrassed now, in the kindest way, that it had mattered so much. The man drove home with something he had not had that morning: the knowledge that the most valuable sentence in his life had cost the speaker nothing, and that he had been saying sentences to his own boy for twenty-four years and had not counted one of them.
Power in its most portable form is a word. It needs no equipment and no permit and no strength, it can be carried into any room a man can enter and most he cannot, and it is spent constantly, by every man, from the minute he wakes, with no meter on it. A man will account for his money to the dollar and his time to the quarter hour and never once in his life count the sentences he said to his son in the truck. Those sentences built the boy. The boy is walking around on them now, the way the plumber walked around on nine words from under a house, and the man who said them cannot remember which ones they were.
That is what this room is about: not speech, which has rooms of its own, but what a word is and what it does, in whatever form it takes. Words make. Words name. Words build the thing they describe and withhold the thing they refuse to say. They outlive the breath they rode in on, especially when written, and they come from somewhere in a man that he did not inspect before they left. The form a word almost always takes, out loud, in one pass, with no draft, is the room beneath this one, and it is where the power actually shows up for most men on most days. This room holds what is true of the word before it is spoken.
Two neighbors own what this room does not. How a man communicates, the mechanics of saying a thing so that it lands, belongs to the yard that trains the mind, in Speech & Communication. What comes out of him when a feeling comes out of him belongs to Expression. What is left is the thing the plumber learned at the pharmacy counter: a word is power, it is the cheapest power a man has, and it is the one he will be accounting for longest.
The Power of Words
"And Samuel grew, and the LORD was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground." — 1 Samuel 3:19
A man's words go one of two places. Into someone, or onto the floor. The boy Samuel's did not fall, and the record treats that as a mark of God's hand on him, which means the ordinary condition is the other one: most of what most men say lands on the ground and stays there. But not all of it, and a man never knows which sentence is the one that went in. Duane did not. This room runs in that order. What a word does, which is make. The names a man hands out, which stick. Words that build what they describe. Blessing, cursing, and the blessing withheld, which is its own kind of curse. The written word, and why it outlives fire. Where words come from. Then the one room off this one, the misreadings, the three questions, the two words that answered a man who had only doubted the willingness, and the one kind of power on this whole line that leaves a man on its own.
A Word Makes
The first act of power in the record is a sentence.
And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light — Genesis 1:3. Not a gesture, not a blow, not a tool. A word, and a thing that had not existed existed. Everything after it in the chapter is made the same way, and the pattern is set before a man appears on the page: power, at its origin, is spoken. A man's words make on a smaller scale, but on the same principle. He says a thing and something that was not there is there. A plan. A fear. A boy's idea of what he is good at. A marriage's idea of itself. Jesus said of his own, the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life — John 6:63, and while no man's words are that, every man's words are more than air. They are the lightest thing he produces and the one that lasts longest.
The smallness is the point. Look at the ships also: though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs — James 3:4. The rudder is the least of the ship and it steers all of it, and a word is the least of a man's outputs and it steers his household. A man who measures power by its size will never count his words, because they weigh nothing. The ship does not care what the rudder weighs.
The Names He Hands Out
The first work given to a man was naming. Whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name — Genesis 2:19. Before he had tilled anything or built anything, he had named, and the names held. That is still the first thing a man does to everything around him, and it still holds.
He names his sons. Not the name on the certificate; the other one. The lazy one. My sensitive kid. The one who can't sit still. He says it once at a cookout and the boy hears it, and it goes in, and he will be forty before he finds out it was not a fact. He names his wife, in the way he describes her to other men, and she will hear it eventually, from one of them or from his tone. He names himself, hundreds of times a day, in the sentences nobody else hears, and the names he gives himself are the most-repeated words in his life and the least examined. A name is a word that stays attached. It is the one form of power a man can apply to a person once and have it keep working for decades without his touching it again.
And he eats his own. From the fruit of a man's mouth his stomach is satisfied; he is satisfied by the yield of his lips — Proverbs 18:20. The proverb is not a promise of reward. It is a statement of diet. Whatever a man says, he lives on afterward. The man who calls his work hopeless in the truck has fed himself that for the drive, and he arrives at the job having eaten it.
Words Build What They Describe
A sentence said out loud becomes a plan, whether or not the man meant it as one.
The description runs ahead of the thing. A man who says this will never work has not reported on the project; he has laid a course for it, and his hands will follow his mouth. A man who says we'll figure it out in front of his crew has not described their competence. He has issued it. This is not magic and it has nothing to do with the schemes that promise a man whatever he speaks; the wanting that takes form is handled where it belongs. It is simpler than that. Every man acts inside the description he has given, and the description was words.
The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence (Proverbs 10:11). A fountain is a source. Things downstream drink from it and are what they drink. With his mouth the godless man would destroy his neighbor — Proverbs 11:9: not with his hands, with his mouth, and the proverb treats the destruction as real. Job, on the ash heap, told his three friends what their words could have done and did not: I could strengthen you with my mouth, and the solace of my lips would assuage your pain — Job 16:5. He is not asking for a cure. He is telling them that a sentence would have held him up, and that they had the sentence and said other ones.
The fountain runs the other way as well. A word that builds does not need to be long. Nine words under a house built a trade. The men who have done the most building with words in a man's life have usually done it in a sentence they do not remember, and the men who have done the most tearing down have usually done it the same way.
Blessing, Cursing, and the Blessing Withheld
A blessing is a word with a name put on someone.
So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them — Numbers 6:27. The priests said the words, and the words put a name on the people, and the blessing followed the name. That is what a father does when he blesses a son, and most fathers do not know they have the office. Jacob, blind and dying, crossed his hands over Joseph's two boys and put the younger under his right, and when Joseph tried to correct him, held them where they were: by you Israel will pronounce blessings — Genesis 48:20. The old man knew exactly what he was doing with his hands and his mouth, and the boys lived their whole lives inside the sentence he said over them.
The blessing withheld is the other side of the same power, and it does more damage than most curses. Esau came in from the field and found the blessing gone, and he cried out with an exceedingly great and bitter cry — Genesis 27:34, and the thing he said to his father is the thing a grown man says at a graveside or a hospital bed with the words still unsaid: "Have you but one blessing, my father? Bless me, even me also, O my father" — Genesis 27:38. A man who was never told by his father that he was good at anything spends forty years asking that question of men who are not his father. The withholding was a word too. It was the word not said, and it built as surely as the one said would have.
A curse has a ceiling. Balaam was hired to curse a nation and could not: How can I curse whom God has not cursed? — Numbers 23:8. He has blessed, and I cannot revoke it — Numbers 23:20. And the proverb says a curse that is causeless does not alight — Proverbs 26:2. A sentence said over a man by someone who had no standing to say it does not have the power the man gives it. That is a hard thing to believe at forty with the sentence still running, and it is true. And when a curse does land, the record shows a man taking it. Shimei came out along the ridge throwing stones and curses at David on the worst day of his reign, and the king's men wanted the man's head, and David said, Let him curse — 2 Samuel 16:10, and then, it may be that the LORD will look on the wrong done to me and repay me with good for his cursing today — 2 Samuel 16:12. He did not revoke the curse and he did not answer it. He handed it up, and kept walking.
What Waits in the Drawer
A spoken word lands once. A written one waits.
King Jehoiakim had the prophet's scroll read to him in his winter house, and as each few columns were read, the king would cut them off with a knife and throw them into the fire in the fire pot, until the entire scroll was consumed — Jeremiah 36:23. It was the whole book. He burned it a few columns at a time, deliberately, in front of men who begged him not to. And the instruction that came back was one line: Take another scroll and write on it all the former words — Jeremiah 36:28. The last verse of the chapter notes that it was done, and many similar words were added to them — Jeremiah 36:32. The written word came back longer than it went into the fire.
That is the quality of the written form, and a man meets it now in a shape no king ever did. The letter in the drawer, the text sent at eleven, the message in the thread, the review, the post: every one of them waits, and every one of them can be read again by someone who was not there, with none of the tone and all of the words. A man who would never say a thing to a face will type it, because typing feels like less, and it is more. It is the form that cannot be walked back, that does not soften with the speaker's regret, and that will be handed to his son by somebody someday in a form he did not expect.
The written word also keeps what the spoken one loses. The sentence from under the house survived because a boy kept it, in his head, for thirty years, against everything that could have erased it. Written down it would have survived him. A man who wants a word to outlast him writes it, and the ones who have shaped him most are usually the ones who wrote something down.
Where the Words Come From
Nothing leaves a man's mouth that was not in him first. The sentence that came out of the abundance of the heart was not a surprise to the heart.
There are those whose tongues are sharp swords — Psalm 57:4, David says, from a cave, about men who had never touched him. The words of the wicked lie in wait for blood — Proverbs 12:6. Lie in wait: the words are not a reaction. They were prepared, and they were waiting for a target, and a man whose words lie in wait for someone has a problem that is not in his mouth. He will want to fix his words. The words are the gauge, not the leak. A man who hears what he says, especially what he says when tired, has been handed an honest reading of what is in him, and most men argue with the gauge.
The accounting is real. The line about every careless word is one most men have heard, and most men hear careless as harsh. It means uncounted. The words a man did not weigh before he spent them are the ones on the ledger, and they are the majority of what he has ever said, and the plumber at the pharmacy understood for the first time that there was a ledger with his name on it, and his boy's.
One Room Off This One
There is one room beneath this one, and it holds the form the power takes almost every time it is used.
The Power of Spoken Words is the word out loud: in one take, with no draft, carried on a tone that arrives before the meaning does, at a volume that announces something whether the man means it to or not, in an hour and a room that change what the same words do. It is where nine words got said under a house, and where every sentence a man has said in a truck went in. It holds its own exit, and it lets out where this room does.
How Men Misread the Rudder
The man who thinks volume is power. He has confused the size of the word with its reach, and the quiet sentence from under the house moved a man further than anything he has ever shouted.
The man who counts the written and not the spoken. He is careful in email and careless in the kitchen, and the kitchen is where his children are being named.
The man who withholds the blessing and calls it standards. He has decided his son will know he is approved of when he has earned it, and the boy is forty and still asking a question the father could have answered in a sentence.
The man who takes a causeless curse as a verdict. Somebody with no standing said a thing over him once, and he has been living inside it for twenty years, and the proverb says it never landed.
The man who types what he would not say. He believes the screen makes it less, and the screen makes it permanent, and it will be read aloud someday in a room he is not in.
The man at the pharmacy. He had carried nine words for thirty years and found that the speaker could not remember them, and he drove home understanding for the first time that his own boy had been carrying some of his, and he could not have said which.
Three Questions in the Pharmacy Line
TRUTH: Are the names he hands out accurate? The lazy one is a sentence that will be true or false for the rest of the boy's life, and the man said it at a cookout without checking. A name is a claim, and claims are checked before they are made, not after they have held for a decade.
LOVE: Who is living on a sentence he has forgotten? Duane had a man walking around on nine of his words and did not know it. Every man has a Duane's share of sentences out in the world, in his sons and his wife and the men he has worked beside, and the accounting he owes is not for the ones he remembers.
LAW: The ledger is real. Every uncounted word is on it, and a man who has never counted them has not been spared the count. He has only been spared knowing it, and that is not the same thing, and it ends.
If You Will
And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, "If you will, you can make me clean." Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, "I will; be clean" — Mark 1:40-41
The man did not doubt the power. He said so: you can. What he did not know was the willingness, and that was the whole of what stood between him and the rest of his life, and he said it kneeling, to a face, out loud, as a man says the thing he has carried the longest. The answer was two words and a hand. A hand on a man nobody touched, and two words that did what every word in this room reaches toward and no word of a man's has ever done. I will. The thing was made clean because the one who could said he would.
A man who has heard those two words knows what a word can do, and he knows whose words do it. His own were never going to. They were going to point at that, or not, and the ones that pointed were the ones that did not fall to the ground.
The One That Leaves on Its Own
The whole of this line has been about making. What a man brings to the point of contact, what rhythm it runs on, how it is stored and loosed, what aims it, and now the form it takes most often, which is a sentence. Every room was about power generated, governed, and spent.
A word is the first thing on the line that leaves a man by itself. He does not carry it anywhere. It goes out the front door on the breath it rode in on, lands in somebody or on the floor, and is out of his hands before he has finished saying it. That is why it is the right place to end this line, and it is also why it raises a question the rest of the line never had to. Everything else a man generated is still where he put it. The strength, the reserve, the held draw, the belief he has not yet said out loud: all of it is in the house, and the question the next line into the house asks is not how much of it there is.