The power of a voice. . .

Many decades before he passed, I began calling my father nearly every day.  It was usually before 6 am and it typically caught him as he finished breakfast and was readying himself to head to his store for another day of work.  The conversations seldom lasted more than 5-10 minutes.  They were about usual things and rarely about anything earth shattering.  They were the words of a son talking to his dad and a dad talking to his son about nothing and everything.  They began when long distance was expensive and the congregation had a flat rate plan that allowed me to call and so I did from my own work day begun in my church office.  Later a cell phone replaced the desk phone but the voices remained the same, aging a bit over the years.  They were conversations filled with love and affection though hardly ever did either of us actually talk about how we felt about each other.  They remain precious memories but, more importantly, are the reason why I still hear the sound of his voice more than a decade after he died.

For all that technology offers to us today, it has stolen some things from us as well.  The screens replaced the handsets but, more importantly, the image of words on those screens has replaced the sound of voices.  We may continue to communicate but we do not talk.  Texting is fine when you need to but it does not and can never substitute for the sound of a voice.  We try as hard as we can to replace the nuance of tone and tenor in the human voice but emojis and fonts are a poor way to encapsulate emotion or give hint to a mood.  Worse than this is that when the person is gone, the texts do nothing to help us remember the sound of the voice that our ear ache to hear again.  They leave us with raw and basic words shared but nothing of the rich and nuanced conversation of people who speak with voices one to another.  I fear what some day the future will steal, the day when our limited speaking will be reduced even further.

Working from home deprives the workers from these conversations.  Zoom meetings are contrived and orchestrated more than real.  Emails and texts are effective to get information to another but they deprive us of the voices and sounds that convey the person.  I write here and just about everywhere as I speak.  As I write these words I am speaking them out loud -- first in my mind and often into the emptiness of my home study.  Words are made for voices and voices for words.  My grandchildren love to hear their grandmother and I read to them.  Stories from books come alive with the sound of the voice.  Sermons heard with the ear are very different from those read on screens.  Yet these conversations have proven to be fragile and rarer than ever before.  I hope that you will not settle for the alternatives but go the extra mile to engage others with the sound of your voice and to listen to the voices around you.  These are not intrusions to your solitude but the very means for family and community.  I hope and pray that we will resist the technology that replaces the sound of the voice with a screen filled with words or images.  Word are not simply my stock in trade but my delight.  If we learn anything of God, we know that they are His stock in trade as well.  The Word made flesh can certainly be read but it is meant to be heard.  Hearing God's voice, what can we say but "Amen."