What's a word?  Actually, quite a bit.  For instance, the first verse of the gospel of John reads, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

     Although this is a mouthful of assertions, we can distill them into one essential point:  the Word, whatever it is (and we shall soon see exactly what it is), is God.

     As God, for what is this word responsible?  According to the next verses, this word is responsible for nothing less than the creation of the universe.  Through this word, the gospel observes, “All things came into being” and apart from word, “nothing came into being that has not come into being.”
     Another mouthful of assertions.  How can a word create the world?  Consider the creation account as it is presented in Genesis 1.  Here we see that God created all things by simply, as it were, speaking them into existence.  So, yes, we can say that word, that is, speech, created the world, that speech shaped and molded the world, that speech established the foundation and ground of the universe.

     And it did so, as the medieval Christian mystic Thomas á Kempis notes in his Meditations, with Prayers, on the Life and Loving-Kindness of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, “without any labour.”  A word, a word that is of speech from God, is the ultimate and unaided power of genesis and being.
     And if speech connotes meaning (how can speech occur without a purpose behind it?), we see clearly that by being the speech that "speaks" the universe into existence, a word affirms the meaningfulness of every created thing.  The speech of a word, the speech that birthed life and reality, weaves meaning into every corner of the cosmos.  Hence, we--and every other living thing--are meaningful.
     And so is the universe.
     All because of a word.