are You in this?

i got myself up out of bed to come and write and the inevitable happened: i read what other people wrote. sometimes this is very, very good. when i'm reading my subscription list on this particular blog, i'm always entertained and on good days challenged and just a few times, speechless. or rather, typeless. typeless?
anyway.
reading the blogs of a jewish rabbi, a liberal Christian author, my dear cousin, my dear old friend, and a random assortment of acquaintances can have a weird effect on me. "haven't i read this before? aren't i about to write pretty much the same thing, only not as funny and with fewer thought-provoking quotes and less art work?" anne lamott wrote that friendship is build on rubble, so i guess my blogging is built on fragments of other people's work. at least for tonight. it's just to help me sleep.
i had a voice lesson today and my teacher, mark, talked about how everything is in the words and the tone. God SPOKE and things came into existence. Jesus has a nickname: the Word. when people whisper to disguise their voice on the phone, all they are doing is taking away the tone of their voice. i am trying to get what i say to ring true, to have real tone, that carries and pings around in a room and ultimately someone's mind and heart. i want my words to mean something and bring weight and love and resonance. i want my words to be a contract, signed by my tone.
i used to listen to amy grant when i was growing up alone in my room. i listened to her and jars of clay and plumb and hanson and sheryl crow and learned how to sing harmony and put inflection in my voice and basically sing my brains out. then i went to college and got vocal training and all that went out the window. but amy grant used to sing a song with a line that said, "words are cruel and seldom true..." nothing rang more true to me during those hard and lonely years. and even though i met a man whose words saturated my heart with healing balm and who knows the importance of keeping your word, even he cannot always keep his word. the song is still true, and will never cease to be so. it is so hard for people to speak and stay true to their word. maybe that is why God chose to be the Word. the be-all, end-all Word to break our deceitful silence. to speak Truth into us.
it's usually too marvelous for words.