For When You Can't Find the Right Words

      "My words sound better on paper or in text than they do in person." A phrase that seemed to consecutively be coming out my mouth when talking to my friends. I've always seemed to have better luck with my words when I write or type them then when I actually try to speak them.

     I think a lot of people feel this way, because we live in a society that's so focused on technology we've gotten used way too used to the feeling of a keyboard and having time to think about what we want to text back, that we've started to loose our social skills. I

    Like the lyrics sung by Bailey Bryan in her song Own It,"Awkward in conversation, but I'm Shakespeare when I'm texting." I mean I can easily relate to those words, and I think most girls can.

   It also doesn't help that I'm surrounded by so many amazing speakers at my Christian college, I mean every where you turn someone is ready to drop some Holy Spirit truth on you. Yet I can hardly stumble out or find the right words when explaining my testimony to a friend. Give me a topic about anything on this world and I can talk your ear off about it, but the second I'm having a conversation and it starts to get deep it's as if my vocal chords catch and I can't remember what words are anymore.

  And I thought I was alone in this struggle. It must mean I wasn't being a good Christian, right? Little did I realize how much the Bible has to say about this exact situation me and so many other girls deal with, and how even some of the most affluential and renowned people of the Bible struggled with finding the right words.

  "I will tell everyone about your righteousness. All day long I will proclaim your saving power, though I am not skilled with words." (Psalm 71:15) 

     Can I just say when I first read this verse I was slightly blown away? I mean this verse is in a Psalm written by King David. Like THE King David. The one who's lineage would lead to Jesus, the man after Gods own heart, like the author of most psalms? To me it was absolutely insane that this guy would even start to think he wasn't good with words.

    Here's a man that wrote some of the most imagistic, emotional, poetic chapters of the Bible and he's saying that he feels as though he isn't "skilled with words"?

   The thing is here I realized how upset I was that David couldn't see all the amazing things his words would accomplish since he was so focused on thinking his words weren't useful, that he didn't sound smart enough or thrilling enough. One thing he did right was he knew no matter how unprofessional or un-smart he words might sound, he could still praise God.

   I had been so caught up in comparing myself to the words that flowed so easily from others, I wasn't seeing the impact the words God was having me say had. For it even says,"For [God's] power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor. 12:9) and I realized that God has been using this weakness I thought I had with my words only to shine His love and show His power more than ever.

   What I wasn't realizing was I thought my simplistic words that I could hardly stumble out still were impacting the people around me just as much as if I had been a skilled professional speaker. Because words impact. No matter how little, how unprofessional, how much you stutter, words still can break down or build up a person. Once I realized that I stopped worrying so much about how my words sounded, but what I was saying. Was I saying things that were building people up and showing them God's love, or bringing them down and taking them farther from Him? When you get into that type of mindset you stop caring about how awkward your voice may sound or how confusing you think your wording is, it only matters that in everything the word from your mouth you are using them to point back to God. 

- Rachel