Word Games

My husband used to play word games with his Grandma. “Rhyming and opposites”, he calls them. I love that story. It sounds like fun.

I kept that idea and played them with my grandson, Fred. I watch him in the rear-view mirror. Sitting in the backseat, toddler shoes bouncing off the bottom of his car seat. Little wheels spinning in his three-year-old word capacity. He looks out the window, scrunches up his face, slaps his knees trying to shake one loose. When he just can’t find a single one in there, he makes a new one up, and we laugh at the sound of it knowing it isn’t real, but it’s really fun to say. Fun just to be together and play games with words. No boards, dice, cards, or pieces to move ~ just the spinners in our mind waiting for our imagination to land on the winning one.

I recently started taking inventory of the words in my mind. And it’s no game. You know, the ones never let loose into the air. The words we keep in the dark. Because, who really wants to think that way? Who really wants to punch, belittle, or betray anyone that way?Not me. Not you. What to do with these words is my question. Do I just allow them to keep coming ~ keep spewing? Why can’t I just decide not to think them anymore? I make decisions every day that I stick to. But these seem to arrive without invitation, without a moments notice. Pushing through the door of my mind like they own the place. And there’s the burn. They do own the place. These gross, ruinous words were planted way before birth. Like DNA.

You can’t stop them from coming. Can’t amputate them like cancer. But we are not without help. We have great Hope! We don’t have to be bombed with the shrapnel of our humanity. We can post a guard at our mind. Twenty-four hour Bouncer at the entrance of our thoughts. He doesn’t need a gun (that’s for weaklings). He uses words. Yep. Words. Not our words or made up words. Real ones. And you’d be amazed at the power they deliver.