>>23459968
>>23459984
much love! I so resonated with what you are expressing. My journey started as a child.
Words have always been my world. Being born mid 1950’s, I grew up with blurry hearing—certain tones just slip past, like smudged glasses on my ears. As a kid, I spent three years in speech therapy, training my tongue to shape sounds right. Every word mattered—how to say it, how to spell it, where it came from. I’d dig into root words, their meanings, their power. I didn’t know then that God was teaching me: words carry your heart’s intent, riding the air you breathe out, vibrating with energy that shapes the world. He showed me this through a teacher’s experiment—two jars of cooked rice. For one, I spoke love: “You’re beautiful, you’re enough.” For the other, I cursed it: “You’re yukky, nobody wants you.” A week later, the loved rice stayed white; the cursed one rotted, black and foul. Words directed with intention aren’t just sounds—they’re power. I pray that at least one person reading this feels that truth.
In my mid-30s, 1991, I was singing Ozzy Osbourne’s “Mama, I’m Coming Home” with the radio cranked, windows down. Life was heavy—bills, broken dreams, heart bruised from fights I couldn’t win. “Times have changed and times are strange / Here I come, but I ain’t the same.” Those words felt like mine. I didn’t know my voice was buying a lie, hooking my heart to darkness. God showed me later: we’re prisms, made to shine His light—truth, love, hope (John 1:5). Like a crystal catching sunlight, our hearts reflect His glory, driving out darkness. But lies, sly as snakes, coat that prism, dimming our light till we can’t see clear. Every lie we buy by our voice—sung, spoken, or thought—sticks like velcro, clouding who we’re meant to be. Back then, my prism was getting dirty, my intent naive as I sang along with not only Ozzy’s spell, but all the popular songs of that era.
My hearing loss was God’s shield. Lyrics were blurry, so I read them on sites, seeing lies others missed. By 40 or 45, around ’96 to 2001, I quit music cold—radio, CDs, gone. God’s voice was louder, His word clearer. Proverbs 4:23 burned in me: “Guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” But music was everywhere—commercials, TV, blaring in stores. TheY—those running media—make sure you can’t escape, pushing lies through airwaves (Ephesians 2:2). I saw lies in pop songs—money’s your god, you’re enough alone, life’s a losing game. Lies that sounded true, hooking hearts. I thought my prism was polished, safe. Then July 2025 hit, and God showed me how deep those hooks go.
Ozzy, the “Prince of Darkness,” played his last concert July 5 in Birmingham—“Back to the Beginning.” I didn’t watch, wasn’t a fan, but something shifted. My sleep watch, tracking REM, told the truth. Normally, I got 1 to 2.5 hours of deep sleep, processing life’s weight. That night, 11 minutes. Then 45, 33, 30, 48 over days. I felt teary, heavy, no reason why—no fights, no stress, just sadness creeping in. July 22, Ozzy died, and “Mama, I’m Coming Home” went viral. I watched his last performance, frail but fierce, and that song stuck in my head. My REM crashed—1 minute, 5, 18, 4, 3. By July 25, I was a blubbering mess, crying off and on, like a “pallor fell over the earth” as my friend called it when I shared what was going on with me. Darkness gloated, and I didn’t know why.