What Our Words Reveal About Us
- Jan 19
- 5 min read
Written by Gabriel Azuola, Head of the House of Azuola
Legal strategist, founder of Cola Blanca Consulting, and Head of the House of Azuola, advising global FinTech and public institutions on regulation, governance, and strategic growth. Dedicated to ethical leadership, institutional development, and responsible innovation.
The words we choose are never neutral. They reveal what we love, what we fear, and ultimately who we are becoming. A single interview reminded me why speaking from love is not weakness, but one of the most demanding forms of truth.
Who was Facundo Cabral, and why his words still matter
I listened to an interview today that felt less like content and more like a quiet visitation. One of those moments that arrive without ceremony, yet leave an unmistakable mark. The question posed to the guest was almost disarmingly simple: whether he began to sing merely because he could. The answer, however, unfolded as something far deeper, an account of inner maturation, of discernment forged over time, of a man who had learned to distinguish between reaction and truth. As I listened, I recognized something familiar. Not an idea I had just learned, but one I had been living, wrestling with, and slowly embodying, often without fully naming it.
The man speaking was Facundo Cabral. To describe him as a musician is to reduce him. Cabral was, above all, a witness. A pilgrim of conscience. His life was shaped by poverty, exile, loss, and wandering, yet remarkably untouched by bitterness. He carried no ideological uniform, no tribal allegiance, no need to convince. His authority came from coherence, the rare coherence of someone who had suffered deeply and refused to let suffering become his identity.
When protest becomes an identity
In the interview, Cabral explained that he began his artistic life as a protest singer. As a young man, he felt compelled to denounce injustice, to expose hypocrisy, to confront what he perceived as broken or false in the world. There was sincerity in that impulse. Even nobility. But maturity, he said, brought him to a realization that altered the entire trajectory of his voice. And he expressed it with a simplicity that felt almost biblical in its precision: “When one only speaks about what one hates, people come to know our enemy, but they never come to know us.” With time, he understood that protest, while sometimes necessary, had a hidden cost. It reveals opposition, but conceals the soul. From that moment on, he chose to sing only about what he loved about what gave him joy, meaning, and life.
That sentence stayed with me because it exposes something uncomfortable and deeply personal. How often do we allow ourselves to be defined by reaction rather than essence? How easily do we mistake opposition for identity? When our language is dominated by what we reject, we may feel morally awake, but we remain oriented outward, revolving endlessly around the very thing we claim to resist. We become reactive beings rather than creative ones. Cabral’s insight points toward a far more demanding path: the courage to speak from love, which requires knowing what we love, inhabiting it fully, and allowing ourselves to be seen without the armor of resentment.
My own journey from reaction to presence
This insight resonates profoundly with a line of reflection I have been walking through over the past years, sometimes consciously, sometimes painfully, always personally. I have lived seasons of rupture, of conflict, of separation from structures and relationships that once defined me. I have experienced the dismantling of inherited narratives, the loss of certainty, and the quiet grief that comes with choosing truth over belonging.
At the same time, I have also lived a profound spiritual reorientation, one marked by Scripture, silence, study, and an unignorable sense that something within me was being reordered, stripped of excess, and slowly brought into alignment.
What I mean by the “inner God”
When I speak of what I sometimes call the inner God or the divine spark, I am not proposing novelty, nor indulging in abstraction. I am trying carefully and reverently to articulate something that Christianity itself proclaims, yet that we often hesitate to live fully: that the Christian God, the God of Genesis, the God revealed in Christ, chooses to dwell within us.
“Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” This is not a metaphor. It is doctrine.
The spark is not ours by nature, it is His presence by grace. And the task is not to inflate the self, but to remove what obstructs God from living through us.
Seen from this perspective, Cabral’s realization takes on an unexpectedly Christian depth. When we speak only of what we hate, our attention remains fixed on the exterior world, on enemies, systems, and conflicts. But Christianity is not primarily a religion of reaction. It is a religion of indwelling. Christ does not begin by asking us to identify adversaries. He begins by asking us to abide. To remain. To let God’s life take shape within us. “You are the light of the world,” not because the light originates in us, but because it has been entrusted to us.
The word comes before the world
This convergence becomes even clearer when psychology and philosophy are allowed to sit humbly alongside theology. Carl Jung warned that what remains unconscious will govern our lives and be mistaken for fate, yet he also cautioned against being possessed by the shadow.
Darkness must be acknowledged, but it must not become our dwelling place. Long before Jung, Socrates insisted that the highest task of a human being was to know oneself, not as an act of self-worship, but as a moral responsibility. And in Genesis, creation itself begins not with force or argument, but with speech: “And God said.” The Word precedes form. Meaning precedes matter. Order emerges from articulated truth.
This is why I have become increasingly attentive to language, not only public speech, but inner speech. To the verb. To what we repeatedly allow to pass through our mouths and our thoughts. Christianity itself rests on this foundation: “In the beginning was the Word.” The Word is not merely descriptive, it is creative. What we speak participates, mysteriously but undeniably, in what becomes real first within us, then around us. I have seen this play out in my own life: how seasons dominated by resentment narrowed my vision, and how seasons anchored in truth and gratitude quietly restructured my inner world, my relationships, and my sense of purpose.
What our words ultimately reveal
Authenticity, then, is not self-expression detached from God. It is self-expression aligned with Him. It is allowing the indwelling Christ to speak through us without distortion. The first truth we owe the world is not our outrage, but our witness. When our words emerge from communion rather than reaction, they carry a different authority. They do not need to shout. They do not need to accuse. They reveal. They illuminate. They make room for recognition rather than resistance.
So this is what I carry with me from that interview and from my own unfolding journey. Be careful what you give your voice to. The world already knows conflict. What it is starving for is presence. Let God speak through what you love, through what gives life, through what reflects His nature within you. Because in the end, the Word is not only how reality was created, it is how it is continually redeemed.
Read more from Gabriel Azuola
Gabriel Azuola, Head of the House of Azuola
Gabriel Azuola is a legal strategist and founder of Cola Blanca Consulting, advising FinTech firms, investors, and public institutions across global markets. He has guided cross-border regulatory strategy and high-value capital mobilization, contributing to ventures surpassing $150 million. Azuola also serves as Head of the House of Azuola, a historic Latin American lineage dedicated to civic duty and ethical leadership. His work focuses on responsible innovation, institutional development, and principled governance.
