The other day I was reading some beautiful prose. The writer had a wonderful way of describing even ordinary things in her childhood. I could feel in those words the love of a child for a father. And in the mind's eye I could smell and see and begin to explore the farm this man had shaped out of forest and bush, rocks and earth. It was as if I were standing on that land and could feel the heat of the sun bearing down on my back. Mere words, and yet what power carefully chosen words have to convey an idea, an image, an experience.
A pastor I once knew spoke of the memory-penetrating parables of Jesus and said, ". . . [just] try to forget the parables of Jesus—heart words . . . pictures that leap in the soul and sing in the memory." J. Wallace Hamilton, Still the Trumpet Sounds (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1970), p. 164. The way he recounted them, leaping in his soul, singing in his memory, couldn't be forgotten either.
Every once in a while I have a similar experience when I come across an uncle's letters that he wrote in World War II to his sister-in-law and her husband and my brother. Either half-buried in some muddy trench or trudging over one seemingly endless Italian hill after another, he writes of his love for his home and his "sweetie"—my Aunt Mary—and tells my brother the things he will do with him when he comes home. His words are rich with affection and pungent with the almost unmentioned sadness that faraway soldiers' letters can't quite fully express.
