Watch the way you talk. Let nothing foul or dirty come out of your mouth. Say only what helps, each word a gift.--Ephesians 4:29, from The Message translation
At this very moment, I'm making a choice. Now, it's a moment after that moment, and I'm making another choice. Now that I am starting my day, Aug. 29, 2007, at 5:55 am, I will be making choices all day long. I will choose what I allow into my mind; I will choose what emotions I dwell on in my heart, and I will choose what actions I will show the world. And throughout the day, I will be choosing what I will say to people.
Speech is taken for-granted in our society today. I see a great deal of talking but I'm not sure if communication is happening. It's very easy to ask someone, "How are you?" It's much harder to commit to really wanting to know the answer before you ask the question. It's easy to ask someone for help on your projects. It's much harder to ask them if they need your help on their projects.
If I could start a national campaign like the Random Acts of Kindness that hit a few years ago, I would call it the "Say One Kind Thing" campaign. Say One Kind Thing...when I am stuck in tunnel vision in my own life, I can often step outside of myself by practicing saying one kind thing to someone else. Saying one kind thing means I have to see that someone else in this world is offering something valuable and worthy to humankind. And I want to help build them up.
I've also found that when a behavioral pattern sets in, changing the behavior can begin with changing the way I talk. When I have found myself being snippy with my spouse, I can shift out of that by simply focusing on saying only the things that help. And if I can push past my own ego, I can usually separate that which helps and that which doesn't help.
Today, I'm making a choice to make my words a gift to those around me. Let's see how this can help. Join me. Say One Kind Thing today.
5 comments:
Nice post!
And now for the musical audio/visual interpretation, go to (copy and paste the following to your address search and hit Enter):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4020243384410905356&q=moody+blues+say+it+with+love&total=9&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
And, as my mother always used to remind me...'Bread cast upon the waters comes back a thousand-fold.'
And for me, it always has...
God bless you and yours,
~ a friend
But wouldn't it be a little soggy? If it is the ocean, it would come back nicely salted. :)
I came across your blog purely by accident but the narcisist in me cannot help but respond to some of the ideas.
We both spend a lot of time with the same generation, I teach graduate school and consult with corporations. The young Urban Professional no longer needs the church. They get things like "Say something nice today" in leadership books, self help, etc. There are thousands of social opportunities hat are much less demanding of their resources. Worse yet, the church has translated the profound mystery of Jesus into Jesus junk (i.e. Jesus loves you on a rubber ball" and bullet points.
I wonder what kind of response your ministry would get if you asked the really hard questions in your blog. Start with "How can I trust a God who people claim is all present and all loving but logically cannot be both" or "Why would the church maintain a belief in a place (hell) that no church member would send their non believing coworkers, family members, or friends"
Thanks for the opportunity to respond. If you want evidence of the type of people attracted to the bullet points and cliche, read the other posts like 'Bread cast upon the waters comes back a thousand-fold." We all know that cliche is not true although it sounds nice.
Dr. Dave,
You speak of 'logic'. Question: Can parallel lines intersect? You probably say no; before the 20th century, all would have said no. Then there was a quantum leap in the understanding of logic -- from the traditional Euclidean logic to the more inclusive Non-Euclidean logic. (In Non-Euclidean logic, the answer to the parallel lines question can be 'yes'!)
The Bible makes it clear (see Corinthians 13:12) that we now see a blurred image in a mirror, because our knowledge is incomplete. But one day we will have complete knowledge as God has complete knowledge of us now. To us, there are paradoxes in Christianity, e.g., Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. This is blurry from our perspective, but not from God's.
There are paradoxes in all of knowledge as we strive to see and model the big picture. In order to make the jump in math to Calculus, we had to accept a previous paradox, 'If two points are infintely close to each other, they are both the same point and at the same time separate points'. Math or religion, the first step to wisdom is to acknowledge our limitations. JiM
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