A Resolution of Words

I devour words.

Words have always been my passion. If I have a spare moment, and there are words, I will be reading them. It doesn't matter if they are significant words or not, really. For example, if I've used the bathroom in your house, I've probably read the back of all your shampoo bottles and other such products. If you give me a newspaper I will read it all, down to the ups and downs of the stock market and that one article about the junior high baseball team that took third in some unimportant regional tourney.

Books of course are not excluded. I have read most of the hundreds of books in my house, and what I haven't read, I plan to. This includes such diverse things as a study on I Corinthians (does that surprise you? It is words) to numerous fantasy novels to my husband's nursing textbooks. Books have shaped my mind over the years. Fantasy novels especially tend to present truth in such a way that you wonder, why exactly have you never thought about it that way before? And before you know it, your viewpoint is forever changed. If, like me, you can devour a thousand page tome in just a couple of sittings, the amount of knowledge you are inundated with can become almost overwhelming, and you start to realize how little it is that you actually know, and how much of the world you have yet to discover.

If the words are significant to me, however, this strange quirk becomes an obsession. If you mention me, or respond to the words I've written, or are simply a friend or an acquaintance, I will read your words. Then I will refresh your blog and read them again. I have folders of hundreds of emails and chats that I cannot bear to delete because they contain your words. I cannot help myself. I have read things that caused me great pain, and saved them, and read them again; not because I like that kind of pain, but because I quite literally cannot resist the temptation to open that email or follow that link.

I devour words. I will not allow them to control me.

And so I am making a stand here. I am choosing to defy this portion of me. I am choosing to ignore some words, words that have caused me frustration, have brought me pain, and have driven the darkness deeper into my soul. I will not visit Freedom in Christ nor Seriosome.org. I will not see what new arrogance has been posted on En Taro Adun or Denudantis Iudicia in Stratis Veritas. I go now to delete many emails and chats, never to see them again. I will not allow words to bind me in chains of blood.

I devour words. I will not allow them to control me. I am the master here.