The Importance and Durability of Words

Through a Facebook comment on my post yesterday, The Importance of Things Left Out, another thought came to me connected to my other post yesterday, Psalm 119:13 – Speaking It.

The comment made my push my memory for when it was that my mother made the comment on Hannah and Elkanah in 1 Samuel 1, and I recall that it was in a Hebrew class at Walla Walla University that my mother and I attended together. The class was Hebrew Readings, and I was taking it as my third year of Hebrew, while she was taking it as her second.

That class was about 45 years ago. I remembered her comment yesterday. That comment has, in turn, encouraged someone else. She would never have imagined this chain of events.

It reminds me of coming in contact with a pastor with whom I had had no contact for a similar length of time. He was pastor of the church I attended my first year in college, 1974, and I encountered him again online around 2019 or so.

In conversation, I mentioned to him that I remembered a sermon he had preached in 1974. It was quite memorable, as it was in a very large, well-off church filled with pillars of the community. It was also his first sermon as a new pastor. He preached on the church of Laodicea and how that church needed to take the lesson to heart, not be lukewarm, and reclaim their first love.

He was surprised that I had remembered his words. I don’t remember many sermons over a long period of time, but I remembered that one as I wondered how long he would remain as pastor of the church he had just begun to serve.

What words that you have said will be remembered? Do you want them remembered?

(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)