I love talking.
It’s my mother’s fault. At the end of every school day she sat with me and eagerly solicited my stories and tales from school over a pre-dinner snack. We sometimes talked for hours, and as my audience, she never tired.
Looking back, I realized those chats were a wonderful tool she developed to keep us close. But they were also a place I started to develop a fondness for storytelling and for words—one that would eventually lead me to my degree and my career and my call. I am in some ways born to stories, to telling them and to reading them.
And so I talk.
With people, to people, at work and at home, about any old thing. And because I am a storyteller I have a sense of both timing and performance: I know where to linger, where to pause, what expression works with what phrase. Like my father, I enjoy making people laugh, saying something unexpected, keeping their rapt attention. This is to my benefit in my career, where I have to make a lot of small talk and/or present material in a way that is engaging but deft.
But it also means that I can be less than careful with my words.
Over the years, caught up in storytelling, I fell into sinful traps. I sometimes exaggerated for an audience to get a laugh, or leaned into a generalization or a judgment that supported something I’m trying to say. I sometimes accidentally slipped and shared a piece of gossip or hearsay, or even complained about someone in order to make myself feel better. I sometimes hurt others by speaking carelessly, even when I didn’t intend to do so. I sometimes flattered, or spoke without wisdom when I was rambling. I sometimes weaponized what was true.
I still fall into those traps if I’m not mindful. We all do, in the most subtle of ways.
I think we all try to “mind our speech” by trying to avoid lying outright, or saying maliciously unkind things. But it’s very easy to tell a story that paints us sympathetically (and condemns someone else) without lying or being unkind. It’s easy to cast ourselves as heroes and others as villains. It’s easy to babble: to say very little of worth in an effort to commandeer attention. It’s easy to use a good—telling the truth—to our own ends. The right use of language can clarify, enlighten, reveal, and illuminate; the misuse of language can obscure, distract, hide, and deny.
What does it mean, then, to strive for something more?
Scripture tells us that life and death is in the power of the tongue, but I find we tend to approach this from a very superficial perspective when it comes to “good” language. We tend to think this means we should encourage people, cheer them up, speak positively. None of this is of course wrong, but right speech—godly speech—is so much more than that. And I am learning the power of that kind of speaking more by the day.
Godly speech can inspire and provoke and entertain. Godly speech can help people see a deeper and higher reality. It can reveal the kingdom of heaven. Godly speech can deliver truth in a way that heals and uplifts even as it convicts. Godly speech can be a balm on wounds. It can integrate what is disintegrated; it can restore what is broken.
What does this look like in practice?
Well, it looks like the people who have spoken life and breath and truth and encouragement into your life. It looks like the authors (in my case, Tolkien) who speak into being visions suffused with divine truth. It looks like the words you scribble down or save so you can remember them later, or the conversations that unlock a new perspective for you so clearly you can hear the click of the key in the lock. You’ll know it when you see it.
A story, to close:
I struggle with telling uncomfortable truths.
It’s part of being a people-pleaser, I suppose, and partially not wanting to hurt people. I can be good at weaponizing truth, but telling it to help someone confront a realization or to change is an altogether different beast. And yet at least four times, in my job, this duty has fallen upon me: to say The Uncomfortable Thing
All four times, I have prayed before that conversation. All four times—sometimes not as elegantly as I would have liked—I have said the uncomfortable thing. I have said it clearly and without dissembling, as it needed to be said. And I said it with love: that is, not just speaking with care and empathy, but from a relationship of care that had been developed long before. Godly language doesn’t just stem from what we say: it emerges from the relationships built around what we say, and prior to what we say.
Not everyone wanted to hear the uncomfortable truth. But I was astonished that in every conversation my sharing it was greeted with both affection and gratitude. They had, it turns out, been longing for honesty and for honesty they could trust—the kind of honesty that was not weaponized or manipulative, but frank and caring.
God blessed, in those cases. But it helped me to understand what godly speech looks like and can do. As I walk through this Lenten season, I am trying to take extra care with it: not only to avoid the less-obvious pitfalls and traps of ungodly speech, but to build the relationships that allow me the credibility to speak in ways that can uplift, grow, and nourish others.
Samaritan's Song 