Sticks and Stones

The March 1862 edition of The Christian Recorder had the first documented account of this old nursery rhyme:

            Sticks and stones may break my bones,
            But words will never harm me.

As we become adults, we become acutely aware of how wrong that nursery rhyme really is. Sure, sticks and stones can break bones but bones eventually heal again. Words, once spoken cannot be taken back and can continue to haunt the wrong person for potentially the rest of their lives.

In my early teens, I was excited to finally reach 12 years of age because I was going to be able to join the youth group, which was thriving at our little Church located in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California. I vividly remember attending the first youth meeting, just to hear the youth pastor announce that he was resigning and moving away. I was absolutely heart-broken. Hope was restored within a couple of weeks when another young single male layperson decided to take the non-paying position. He took the position and attendance quickly plummeted. Within a few months, only about a half-dozen "drugged" youth members (those drugged to church by their parents) remained. His last great act before he quit as youth pastor and dropped out of church completely was to write letters to all his remaining youth attendees. After he distributed the letters, he promptly left. Since our parents were still in church, we decided to open our letters and share with each other what he had to say. The first few letters were great words of affirmation, which left me excited to see what he had written to me. I opened the letter and started reading a laundry list of  the faults that he saw in me. I was absolutely devastated. From that day forward, I struggled a lot because I had a low self image of myself. The seed of doubt had been sown.

By the time I reached my Senior year in high school, I had already decided that as soon as I graduated I would find a job and work at a blue collar job the rest of my life. Having worked several summers as a custodian at the high school that I attended, I had come to believe that I probably couldn't do any better. College was only for kids from wealthy families and I wasn't one of those. But God had bigger plans for my life and he was going to use another person to plant yet another seed. That seed was called "hope". This woman told me that I was destined for bigger things and that I could accomplish my goals and dreams. Although I took a stab at college out of high school, it took 15 years for that "hope" seed to sprout and take root. You see, the doubt seed that was planted in my youth had such a strong root system that it would hang on long into my adulthood.

 

Five years after Karen and I got married the decision was made that I would go back to college to finish my education. After the first semester, we ran out of money and I hit a whole new low in my life. I literally cried all the way home that night from work when I realized that my dream of finishing my education had ended and that I was going to be stuck in my present job for the rest of my life. Karen knew something was wrong as soon as I got home and I had to tell her that I no longer was going to have money to go to school on. I had maintained a 3.6 GPA but I was an older student (32 years old) and scholarships were not plentiful for somebody like me. Karen encouraged me to take a leap of faith and after prayerful consideration, we continued on utilizing low interest student loans. By this time, we had learned a valuable lesson about marriage that some folks never seem to grasp. Once a couple are married, God expects them to function as a single unit. As I continued to take classes, it was truly a partnership this time and we have attacked all problems with this methodology since. WE graduated in August 2002 with OUR Bachelors in Accounting and would finish OUR Master's in Management in 2007, just two months before my Dad passed away. In 2003, WE were hired by the Department in Army as a GS-05 and today WE are a GS-13 (equivalent between major and lieutenant-colonel). Leaving spirituality out of the discussion at this point, by man's standards WE have done alright in OUR education and career, however in the background of my mind there is a list of faults that plays from time to time planted by a person in my youth.    

If you have ever read Genesis Chapter One, you have seen the words, "and God said..." That is always followed by an action because when God says something, it happens. Jesus said in Mark 11:23, "Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him." In other words, our words have authority (when coupled with faith) and action can be taken based on them. The whole point here is that words (speech) are very powerful and if they were not, God would not have high-lighted the power within them in his Word (the Bible).

Just as a person planted seeds of doubt in my mind at a young age, we all are able to build others up or tear them down based on the words that we speak to them. We just have to remember that the words we speak to our children and spouses can either build them up or tear them down. It is amazing how many people don't realize the long-term damage they are doing when they say things like, "I knew you wouldn't be able to do that right" or "your not very bright." Sometimes it's not that blatant or obvious, but the intention is negative none-the-less.

The good news is that it is never too late to change the way we speak to our loved ones and others with whom we interact, especially if we have been speaking negative things towards them. If we put into practice the concept that as married couples we are truly a single unit, then it only makes sense that we would want to speak positive things into our mate. By building our mates up, we are strengthening ourselves. Also, by being cognitive that we need to try to balance the negative corrective discipline of our children with an equal amount of affirmation, we strengthen the familial unit by having children who are able to identify appropriate behaviors/actions but also have healthy self-esteems.