Day 2.
Nothing thrilled my little girl self more than Disney’s Cinderella. Our family would borrow a VCR and the VHS tape from my dad’s co-worker and I’d stick that movie in day after day. Sometimes, toward the end of the movie, just after the Duke slipped the slipper on Cinderella’s foot, I’d quickly rewind the movie and press play again before Mom caught me. In my 4-year-old logic she’d say “No” if I asked to see it a second time, but she’d just roll her eyes and say “Ok” if she saw I was already watching it again.
I admired everything about Cinderella – her dainty feet, her perfect hair, her bed-making skills, her sweet attitude and her hard work. But the underlying reason I loved it that much was that it was the first story I really understood and appreciated. I couldn’t have told you that as I lay sprawled out on the carpet, retelling the story by drawing in one of the notepads my dad had given me from his printing shop, asking my mom to caption the pages since I couldn’t write yet. But looking back I know that’s where my love for stories and words began.
We take words for granted. They’re just a means of communication – right? We just use them to convey our meaning or express our needs or wants. But they are powerful. Ask the woman whose family labeled her as “Dummy” or “Fatty” as a little girl. Ask the man whose parents told him he could achieve great things for God. Ask the weary mom telling herself she’s a failure. Ask the little boy in the wheelchair whose brother stands up for him to kids who bully him.
If you’d go look in my “baby box,” as we called it, you’d find several books I wrote as a 5-year-old. Words I put down on paper to get the pictures out of my head. One in particular was “The boy, The Dog, and The Egg Yoke.” (Yes, “yoke.”) Mom dropped an egg on the kitchen floor once and Daddy called our dog Samson in to lick it up. It fascinated me and I wrote a story about it.
Words have power because they have a speaker with a motive. As a little girl my motive was simple: to let out my creativity and my love for stories. But not all words come from pure motives.
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.” Proverbs 18:21
What are some of the words that swirl around you, and what is their source? Are they worth believing?