We speak because we must. Not because words guarantee understanding, but because silence threatens to erase us. Every sentence is an attempt to bridge the distance between minds between one consciousness and another. Words defend, accuse, clarify, persuade. Sometimes they change lives. More often, they vanish.
Speech is powerful only on one condition: that it is received. Remove the listener, and language collapses. Isolate a human being long enough, and even their screams dissolve into nothing—sound without consequence, pain without witness.
This is the quiet terror beneath human existence. We are creatures obsessed with meaning, yet trapped in separation. We write. We speak. We plead. And the universe offers no promise that anyone will answer.
Unless there is God.
Not God as comfort, but God as witness. Judgment implies attention. Omniscience implies that nothing is overlooked—not the grand confession, not the half-formed thought, not the cry that never reaches the mouth. Faith does not eliminate suffering, but it denies absolute isolation. It asserts that there is a listener who cannot turn away.
In that framework, no word is wasted. No prayer is unheard. Even silence is known. The believer is never speaking into a void; the void is an illusion sustained only if the universe is indifferent.
This is not an argument that faith is easy. It is an argument that faith answers the most brutal question: What if no one is listening? Religion responds by refusing the premise. It insists that every moment is already observed, every struggle already accounted for—without the need for performance, explanation, or proof.
But what of those who cannot accept this answer? What of words that seek only human understanding, human acknowledgment? Perhaps that is why we persist—writing, speaking, recording traces of ourselves. We are not merely expressing thought; we are searching for witnesses.
To be heard is to be affirmed as real. Faith claims that this affirmation is permanent. Without it, we hope—desperately—that somewhere, somehow, our words will still find their way to someone who sees.
A Note on the Process: I have chosen to let AI assist me in formulating and polishing my wording.