Words

Today, more than at any other time in history, we are talking to each other. In the past, the voices that we were hearing were professional voices, but today, the content we are engaging with is less professional and more social. 

When voices were professional, we had a certain expectation, and that changed the way that we read or heard the words. It changed the way that we engaged with the content. The way that we came, expecting some measure of authority, expecting some level of experience, expecting some level of wisdom in the content meant that we read expecting the words to impart something to us. 

No longer. 

Today, we know that the person on the other side of those words is a person not entirely unlike us. It is someone just out there living their life, with whatever experiences they have, whatever viewpoints they have, whatever politics and religion and family structure and whatever that they have. So no longer do we expect them to speak with authority. 

We expect them to speak with a voice more like ours. 

And that leads to changes in the ways that we engage that content...and how we interpret its creators. 

If this is a person somewhat like us who is speaking, then we feel justified in critiquing their language. They didn't say that the way that we would. They used such-and-such a word or a sentence structure that doesn't sound right to our ears. We start to interpret not through what words mean, but through what words mean to us...because the language is, after all, not fundamentally different than our own. 

So if we go into an interaction and have a predisposition toward hearing a certain phrase as arrogant, we will assume that the person offering the content is arrogant. If we go in thinking that certain sentence structures indicate hostility, we will think them hostile. We engage content today as if we were the ones creating it, and if we were creating it, it would most definitely mean whatever those words and phrases and structures mean to us and what they have meant throughout our lives. 

The problem is...the only content created in our language is the content that we create. Other content, created by others who are like us but who are not us, is not created in our language; it is created in theirs. And that means it comes bearing their experiences and dispositions and legacies, not ours. 

That means that it's possible that what sounds hostile to us never even crossed the creator's mind as hostile. What seems funny to them might not seem funny to us. What we take as arrogant, they might see as confident. We assume something is an opinion (because, after all, it might not be a topic we have invested much energy in), but the creator may have spent years in the rabbit hole, researching such a thing. 

No longer do we assume that anyone speaks with any measure of authority, unless they happen to have some kind of credential behind their name. And even then, it's iffy - it depends on what we think about those credentials. No longer do we expect wisdom or experience or anything measured. We expect that what we see is someone else spouting off the same way that we spout off, writing in a language similar to ours with a background similar to ours with an energy level similar to ours and an ability similar to ours and...

...and we read their content in our voices and criticize them for not doing it the way that we would do it. We judge them by a standard they could not possibly know, let alone live up to because the minute they would meet our standards, they would tragically fail by someone else's. 

The only way to exist is to be yourself, to speak in your own voice, to create your content and offer what you have to the world as earnestly and honestly as you can. 

And to know that in a world without authority, in a world without deference, in a world that can't consider an experience outside its own unless you can prove it - and even then, it's iffy - everyone will take everything you say in their own voice and hold you to standards you didn't even know were out there and your message will always, to one degree or another, be lost somewhere. 

But in all the right places, in all the important places, in all the places where God has placed hearts that need to hear them, they will still hit home. They will still be just right. For all the discouragement you will face, you will still encourage someone. 

And that's reason enough to keep speaking anyway.