What letter are you missing?

Yesterday’s post was about singing out loud. As I was sharing the video clips with my four-year-old Lydia, she wanted to watch more. We began to search YouTube for more kid-friendly musical clips when we stumbled across one by Sesame Street. Nora Jones was singing soulfully and beautifully about missing her friend, the letter Y. As the different words scrolled across the screen that couldn’t be spelled without the letter Y, I began to ponder, am I missing any letters from my life?

I think we all go through seasons of our life dropping letters from words and living without them. For example, the letter J. Where would we be without it? Joy would become oy as in oy vey, the Jewish interjection for woe. Without the J in our joy- the feeling of happiness, great rejoicing- becomes the word that literally means great sorrow or distress.

Or what about the word trust? Trust is defined in Merriam Webster dictionary as an assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something. Trust without its T becomes rust. We don’t even need to pull out a dictionary for this word. We can all conjure up a picture of something with rust. It is decaying, flaking, a blight, corroding.

I know you can’t drop the first letter of every word and have such a dramatic opposite effect of the original word’s meaning. But what I do know is I need joy and trust in my life, along with a lot of other words. Hope, happiness, fun, faith, patience, rejoice, love, family, marriage, God. So even though the clip that started this line of thinking was a silly Sesame Street spoof, it made me grateful today for letters and the words they help create and my desire to aspire to live out words in my life.

Are you missing any letters from your life? Can you think of any other words that, when one letter is dropped, its meaning changes dramatically?

In case you want to see the video clip, here it is, Nora Jones, Don’t Know Y