Reading

You know, when humans were first moving around on the earth they would shelter in caves,

and people would make marks on the walls to show they were there,

like graffiti, leaving their marks to send messages and tell stories to people,

even those that came after those who left the marks had gone.

People have always left their marks, on walls,

or in mud that dries and keeps its mark,

or in sand that blows away in the wind or washes away in the tide.

People can write all sorts of complicated things using pictures.

Long ago, the Egyptians used pictures to write their stories on their walls,

and pictures are still a strong part of the way some people write their languages,

like Chinese and Japanese.

But the languages people speak are too complicated for pictures to say everything they want to say.

So they had to come up with a different way of doing things.

Well, as people went from speaking to each other with grunts and different sounds, they worked out ways to speak between themselves,

putting different sounds in various patterns to make words,

and putting those words together in different ways.

And they worked out what all the individual sounds were,

and called them different letters,

and then worked out a sign for each letter.

And after that they could write down the signs for all the sounds in a word

in the order that they were spoken.

In other words they began to write down their languages.

Letters are signs for the sounds that we make,

so if someone writes the signs for the sounds that make up a word,

if we can read the signs we can imagine hearing the words.

And the words of God that were spoken by the Messenger all those hundreds of years ago were written down,

so if we learn to read the signs we can imagine hearing those amazing words just as they were spoken

as a mercy for humankind so very long ago.