Because we have been created with speech, the meaningful speech of a meaningful creator who freely chose to speak us and the cosmos into being, we have more meaning than we can possibly imagine.  We can therefore conclude that although we will never understand everything about our existence, we can understand and communicate with one who does.  We can further conclude that if we choose to embrace the full truth of Word became flesh, that Jesus is indeed God become human being, the eternal fount of truth and meaning made visible in material experience, we will see and grasp everything we need to know.  And we understand that one day, life will no longer be a frustratingly finite and heartbreakingly terminal mystery.  We will know.
     Yet it all begins, as does everything else, with speech.  So, speak.  Speak and experience who you are, speak and experience who you can be, speak and experience the truth about the way the world is made.  Most importantly, speak, and know and believe that God is there, listening and ready to respond.  Speak, and experience your creator, speak and know your maker.  Speak, and find the meaning that is your true life and home.

(Excerpted from It's All in a Word, by William E. Marsh, © 2012)

     Toward the beginning of The Colonel, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's harrowing and incisive novel about life in post-revolutionary Iran (1979 and beyond), he portrays one of the chief portagonists, Amir, remarking, "I'm capable of anything when the world treats me as nothing . . . and, insofar as I have become nothing, all things are therefore permissible to me."
     Though this observation is eerily similar, in content and worldview, to Dostoyevsky's far more famous quote, as it appeared in his Brothers Karamazov, "If there is no God, everything is permitted," it is also very different in form and effect.  Whereas Dostoyevsky was making a point about the necessity of God for formulating sound and consistent moral judgments, Dowlatabadi is making one about the worth of the human being.  If someone thinks that he is nothing, if someone has been convinced, be it by the circumstances of his life or the observations of others, that he has no worth or value, then it follows that it does not matter what he does or does not do:  he's useless, anyway.  Who cares?
     This is a recipe for human destruction.  People who think they are nothing and conclude that therefore it does not matter what they do are people who inhabit the darkest corners of human history.  People who have decided it doesn't matter what they do are people who have no compunction about treating other people as nothing, too.  It is the stuff of the worst of human pain and tragedy.  It leaves us with a world in which good is bad and bad is good, for nothing matters anyway.  We are nothing.
     Unless, to draw a page from Dostoyevsky and many others, there is a God.  If there is a God (and there is), we can know that we have purpose, and that we are meaningful, inherently meaningful.  We are meaningful because of who we are, and as we are, nothing more, nothing less.  We are the image of God, created by him with lasting meaning and purpose.  How then can we be nothing?  And how then can we see others as the same?
     Don't think that you are nothing, for you will treat others as nothing.  Instead, believe that you are something, something inordinately wonderful and special:  you are the creation of God.

          While God is indeed sovereign, fully capable of moving any and all things to execute his will and purpose, God is also a deity who expresses, repeatedly, his love and concern for us, we frail human beings who occupy the world he made.  It is God's love that most fully expresses who he is to us.
     Many centuries ago, when the prophet Elijah (as the author of 1 Kings 19 records the incident), rightly frightened at the threats of the pagan queen Jezebel to end his life, as she put it, "tomorrow," ensconsed himself on a desert mountain, God made this very clear to Elijah and, today, to us.
     Initially, as the text tells us, God dazzled Elijah with, first, a powerful wind; second, an earthquake; and third, a fearsome fire.  However, we read, God "was not in" these things.  But then Elijah heard the sound of a "gentle blowing" (or, depending on the translation, a quiet whisper or a soothing or hidden breeze).  And out of this gentle blowing, God spoke to him.
     Although God displayed his power to Elijah, when he spoke to him directly, he did so as a gentle blowing, a soothing breeze.  He spoke kindly.
     As he will to us.  Ultimately, God is a God of kindness, a God of love and care, a God whose deepest nature is to love, to love you, to love me.  God loves us, loves us as we were, as we are, as we will be.
     When all else fails, when everything else seems to crumble and fall apart, remember this:  God is love.
     Feel the gentle blowing.

     Where are we?  Well, you might say, we know that we are on a planet that is part of a solar system that is part of a galaxy that is part of and situated in a universe.  True enough, but where is the universe?  In space, you might say, but where, I might reply, is space?  Space simply is, you may respond, but is space everything?  And how would we know?
     We can only be "somewhere" if there is a "where" for it to "be" in.  And there can only be a "where" if there is a "where" in which it, in turn, can be in.  If this is so, however, from where did this "where" come?  And from where did its "where" come?  We'll never see the end of it.
     We are only "somewhere" if there is a "where" that has always been there, a "where" that in and of itself, and in and of itself alone, is "somewhere," once, now, always, and forever.
     We are only somewhere if there is a God.

     What if history has no point?  What if, as the nineteenth century German historian Jacob Burkhardt suggested, history is nothing more than human struggle, the struggle of human beings for power and place in a world of time and passage which they, according to Burkhardt, will never really understand?
     It is difficult, however, to live as if our lives and the histories that flow out of them, have no point.  We all want to believe that what we do has meaning.  But just what is history's ultimate point?
     When the Mede-Persian king Cyrus proclaimed, in the sixth century B.C., that the Jews living in captivity in Babylon could return to Palestine, he did so because he recognized that over and beyond him was God, and that this God was working in history with love, reason, and purpose.  Cyrus knew that although he was a mighty king who had conquered a great deal of the known world, he was ultimately a very minor player in a much bigger drama:  the love of God.
     Cyrus was wiser than he realized.  The love of God is indeed history's ultimate point.  It is the love of God that impelled the creation of the world, it is the love of God that enabled the emergence of humanity, it is the love of God that birthed the fact of you and me.  It is the love of God that drives time, and it is the love of God that drives history.  Indeed, it is God's love, a love that loves regardless of form or circumstance, that makes our lives worth living, our world and its histories worth pondering.  Without God's love, history would not be. 
     And that's the point.