“Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.”

                                                                        Psalm 119:105

I love the internet and the computer because you have access to all kinds of stuff. (I hate it for that reason too.)

I looked something up online recently and found that the Bible (depending on the version you’re using it varies so we’ll just use an average) has around 750,000 words.

War and Peace, the epic novel by Leo Tolstoy, has around 587,000 words.

The average John Grisham novel has around 90,000 words.

All that got me to thinking. Over this last year of Covid (end of March 2020 to end of March 2021) the thing I’ve done the most is writing. I couldn’t go and visit folks – at most I could call them or check up on them through email. So, I wrote. And wrote. And then wrote some more.

There was the weekly sermon; the daily (now three times a week) devotional; and the Bible studies I composed. I went into those files in my computer and did a quick word count, and I was shocked. In this last year, I have written over 403,000 words. (225,000 in sermons, 110,400 in devotionals, and 67,700 in Bible studies.) Prolific writer, that’s me.

But from all that comes a really important question: how much of it made a difference? With all those words, you’d think people would get overwhelmed and check-out. How could all that jumbled up garbage make a difference?

Then I thought of the man who told his preacher his sermons weren’t very good because he couldn’t remember hardly any of them. The preacher told the man, “You know, over my life I’ve eaten three meals a day for sixty years. That’s an awful lot of meals – over 60,000 – and yet I can’t remember but a few of them. But every one of them gave me the nourishment I needed for that day.”

So, maybe I need to quit thinking of the cumulative total. Spread out over the course of a year, I only wrote (and you only read) an average of 1,100 words a day. Four pages.  Enough to hopefully nourish you with God’s word, but not enough to overwhelm anyone.

Thanks be to God for His Word, and the joy and responsibility of sharing it.

Father we give thanks for the guide that Your Word is in and to our lives. In Jesus’ name, AMEN.