The Weight of Words

I google the titles of my books sometimes to see what readers are saying about them. Over the weekend, I found a blog entitled, A Mess Called Amrie's Life, written by a woman named Marie Annie, featuring a series of posts about my singles book, Single Servings. It sounds like she plans to blog all the way through the book. I'm excited to see what God does with her series as she digs into the various Bible passages I wrote about in the book. I'm also quite moved that somebody is taking something I've written so seriously. It reminded me of something that happened five years ago. I spoke in a coffee shop, along with another author, about the subject of unmet expectations (most of us expected to be married shortly after graduating from high school or college) as a single person. Afterward, a woman who was carrying a tattered, beat up copy of Single Servings approached me and asked me to sign it. That is every author's dream. Well, maybe that, or seeing somebody sitting on a plane or in a coffee shop reading your book. Both of these examples remind me about the weight of words. Writers produce tens of thousands of words in every book, a thousand or so in every article, and many more thousands in blog posts every month. Once they are out there, it's nearly impossible to get them back. That doesn't mean we don't change our minds or grow over time. We certainly do. But for one moment in time, we recorded our thoughts about something, turned them loose and then moved on to write about something else. Five years later, someone might just pick them up and begin writing a series of blog posts about them. Or, in my case, I'm reading The Accidental Tourist, written in 1986 -- 24 years ago. Imagine writing something today that somebody might pick up and read in 2034. Kind of puts things into perspective, doesn't it?

Lee Warren is an author, editor and freelance writer, specializing in feature writing, NASCAR and baseball. He is also a fan of tennis, books, movies and coffee shops.