Sticks and stones …… Photo: pixels.com
An old saying goes “Sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you…”
Murray Smith
I don’t believe this because of having seen the damage caused by careless and thoughtless words recklessly released over people’s lives.
There’s astonishing power in spoken words. They can influence other’s lives for good, building them up and bringing encouragement – equally they may wreak devastation and set in motion deep wounding and painful destruction in a person’s life.
I can recall words that were spoken to me years ago, which have been an enduring ‘guiding light’ and stabilising strength to me. “Life and death are in the power of the tongue,” the Bible says. Words of faith, offering hope, will significantly determine the trajectory that our lives take. By contrast, the power of negative words spoken over a person can cause lasting injury that restrains them from ever reaching their potential.
Many years ago, a farmer was working with his son on a tractor repair. An argument broke out between them over what the problem was and the best strategy for fixing it. It got heated with the father aggressively claiming superior knowledge and experience in a shouting match stating, “You will never be half the farmer I am!”
The son ‘incubated’ those words. Decades later, long after the father was deceased, that son remained fiercely driven at a sub-conscious level to prove his father wrong – to show that he was ‘twice the farmer,’ his dad had been. That burdensome, broken motivation originated in reckless, injuring words getting imprinted on a young man’s soul.
In my earlier years pastoring, I sat in a gathering where a speaker called me out from the front, saying that to ‘survive well’ I needed to learn about ‘being like a duck.’ The crowd laughed but he explained his meaning in a way that’s provided a life-time strategy for ‘processing’ negative words. A duck’s ability to let water just run off its back, means it never gets water-logged and never sinks through saturation… it remains buoyant, afloat. Unkind, negative words inevitably take us down if we brood on them. That lesson of ‘getting over’ potentially harmful words quickly and shedding them just like a duck sheds water, has meant a lot to me.
Statue of John Wesley in Shoreditch. Photo: Andrea Nonni, pexels.com
In the 18th Century, John Wesley’s influence as the founding father of the Methodist ministry helped save England from the kind of revolution that France underwent. His life became a powerful force for good across society of that day. It began with words his mother spoke to him at five years old, when one night the family home was burning to the ground. It seemed their large household had all escaped safely until five year old John’s frightened little face appeared at the window of an upstairs bedroom. It seemed hopeless until brave men formed a human ladder to rescue John – burning beams crashing onto the place he’d just been standing. Clinging to his relieved mother, her inspiring words sealed forever a little boy’s sense of destiny, “Thou art a brand plucked from the burning. God must have some special purpose for thee.”
It’s worth considering – are our words ‘making’, or ‘breaking’ people?
