A vocal warm-up

Voice: noun. The person or other agency through which something is expressed or revealed.

When I think of this term, I picture my senoir high english class, full of students with upturned faces. Every person had recieved back an assignment in which we were asked to give an analasis of the "voice" of an author of a particular book we were reading. No one received a passing grade.

"Can anyone define the term voice for us?" asked the teacher, almost rhetorically. She adjusted her glasses so that they rested on tip of her nose to better expose the wide eyes and high eyebrows of feigned curiousity. No takers. Next she proceeded to distribute a packet several pages thick on how to identify and assess an author's distinct voice. After a few minutes of reading through it with us, she set it down abruptly and began speaking to us with a sense of honest vulnerability about how she found her own voice through writing. She concluded by telling us that we each most likely hadn't found ours yet, and that it would probably take years before we overcame the fears and intellectual obstacles of expressing it.

I did not learn exactly how to extract an author's voice from his words by reading that handout, and I assume niether did the rest of the students present that day. Yet I did learn something about the sheer, organic power that one's voice has. And I remember leaving class determined to find mine.

I do know that one's voice is not something that can be explicitly identified or defined. It speaks for itself, somewhere between the periods and pagination, semicolons and syllables that flow together to create the percussive accompaniment. The words themselves are the instruments, but the voice- the voice transcends them. It's elusive, yet it somehow manifests itself in the ink sprawled across a page in clusters of black characters.

So this is my vocal experiment. And it may not be pretty at first, seeing as I still have some warming up to do. I'm not one of those people whose thoughts pour out rapidly from heart to hand, without filter, and without care, as they form one's own public journal. For me, a journal has always been private. But I've decided to end my vow of silence to the world, and to offer up my voice into the mix of sounds and melodies, whispers and shouts, clatter and reverberation already whirling around and vying for audience.

Yet I cannot go without saying that my mission in starting this blog is not simply to make my own voice heard, but to carry the Voice of someone else- to become an agency through which that divine Someone is expressed or revealed. I hope to be the means by which He will continue His communication to us as he has throughout history. And I invite anyone to hear, who cares to listen.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John 1:14