“Nothing ever seems as big or as terrible — oh, nor as beautiful and grand either, alas!  — when it is written out, as it does when you are thinking or feeling about it.  It seems to shrink directly you put it into words.”  — L. M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

Sitting, cat-like, in a sunny spot on the paved portion of our driveway, when I read this passage, I wanted to write it down.  And somewhere during the process of copying it into my journal, I had taken it out of context entirely and begun tracing its implications in places quite beyond the fictional musings of Emily Byrd Starr.   So here’s a portion of the resultant journalings, all from the sunny spot on the driveway:

Is this, I wonder, part of the power of the Word who was in the beginning with God, why the Word is so apt a name for Him?  No word can ever fully capture the thing it is meant to signify, but apart from words we could signify very little.  Words provide a tidy packaging for a feeling, idea, or image so that it can be shared – though never entirely shared, never fully communicated.  Is this not what the Word does: providing a sort of “packaging” so that some small part of the God of the universe would be intelligible to us?  How, apart from that Word incarnate dwelling among us, could we have come anywhere near to beholding His glory as we do?  Not to say that Christ is some shrunken version of God — by no means!  But, in a way I can’t quite comprehend, much less put into words, He is God made small, humbled to become obedient to the point of death.  While a glimpse of the face of the Almighty would have killed Moses, this Word who is God meets us in our frailty and is neither so big or terrible nor so beautiful and grand as a full view of His full self would be.   Is He not good?