| Sunny Side Up May 3, 2006 �2006, Kathleen Gibson Guard your words carefully The longer I remain in this business of words, the more respect I have for their power. Words are change agents. We live and die by them. They affect us personally and socially. They build up and they destroy. I don't know what I expected, really, in the moments before I opened that note. Surely not what I found. I recognized the sender's address - a friend; not a close one, but someone I'd been pleasantly acquainted with for years. Opening it, I wondered why a letter and not a phone call. But though the address belonged to a friend, the thoughts on the page read more like a stranger's. Words darted at me like rats freed from a trap. Bruising. Incriminating. Judgmental and critical. Perhaps, I think on days like that, it's not our guns the government should require us to register, but our tongues! Author Mark Twain understood well the impact of words on one's psyche. "I can live for six months on a good complement!" he noted. Mother Theresa agreed. She too, knew that words linger long on the shelves of our hearts - longer than the canned goods in our pantries. "Kind words," she said, "can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless." So too, the echoes of the opposite kind. Test that: How long do you have to think before you recall negative words thrust your way? Not well thought out words crafted in love to promote growth, though they may have hurt at the time - those are different entirely. I mean words thrust your way in the white heat of anger. Words that said, in a thousand demeaning ways, "You're no good. I don't trust you. You have no value!" How long? Not long, I imagine. For that reason, say those who know, we should speak ten positive words for every negative one. Once upon a time, I'd have responded immediately to that letter, using a few scathing words of my own. But experience has taught me something else about words - of all weapons known to man, the negative ones have the deadliest rebound - and they bring an audience with them. As that wisest of sages, Anonymous, once said, "You can't act (or speak!) like a skunk without someone getting wind of it." It takes longer for some of us to learn this than others, it seems. But time wounds all heels, eventually - all but the most calloused, that is. God's not finished with me yet (just ask the Preacher!) but he is tempering this heel, teaching me that it's better to take time to pray than to leap, flailing and pointing, into the bloody battle of words. I'm becoming a student of King Solomon in this matter. This morning I read this, in his book of Proverbs. "A fool's mouth is his undoing, and his lips are a snare to his soul." Guard your words. And when vicious ones attack you, sometimes the best response is silence. Respond Home |
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