Death and Life

Proverbs 18:21 states “Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.” I want to thank a friend of this blog for inspiring this post.

Giving is typically viewed as a toxic subject. Somebody, usually in a position of authority, is attempting to guilt manipulate his followers into funding his dreams at their expense. We have it all wrong. True generosity with money or words puts the giver into a position of power.

Once I decided to make some enlargements of some of my favorite photographs. I decided to try Walmart. Enlargements made by the mall camera store are a bit pricy. Instead of handing your negatives to a store employee and giving him instructions, Walmart has a customer operated scanner connected to a computer that takes the order. Of course I had never seen one of these things. I was not sure how to operate it and I didn’t want to make any mistakes. I asked the young woman behind the counter for some help. She walked me through the process. At that time, I didn’t know that different sized prints are not necessarily proportional to the negative. She taught me how to selectively crop the negative in order to get the best results and gave me some tips when I was making a bad decision. In an hour I came back to the counter to pick up the prints. When I examined them it was obvious the young woman spent some time tweaking the color and contrast because the prints were more vibrant and “deeper” than the originals. When I paid my bill, I received three dollars and some coins in change. I handed the three dollars back to the young woman and opened my mouth. I am not sure why I was inspired to speak these words, but I said, “You are much better than the kind of people that usually work at one of these stores. You should think about opening your own business someday.” The young woman burst into tears. When she stopped crying she told me she was studying accounting in night school. Someday she wanted to open her own office. With three dollars and a few kind words I had validated a life.

Truly, death and life are in the power of the tongue. I don’t know how far to push this idea, but I believe the words and the money we give in this world are more powerful than we understand, both in the world that can be seen and world that can not be seen. Do you want to be a blessing or a curse? Every day we are given the choice. We can speak words of blessings in the world or we can engage in cursing our brothers and engaging in malicious hurtful gossip. Dear Lord, let my words be full of compassion, peace, mercy, and honesty. So often they are not what they could be.

Oh, the second part of that verse? “And they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.” I would interpret that to mean if we love to wag our tongues, and who doesn’t, we will eat the fruit of our words. Would you prefer to eat the fruit of curses or the fruit of blessings? Your choice.

Let me end with the quote that inspired this post.

“If you have a favorite waitress or waiter at a restaurant think about this. . . .Have you ever told them how much they mean to you and that Jesus really loves them. Tell them about Jesus...then leave them a big tip. WWJD? (What Would Jesus Do) He'd hug them, bless them, meet their need and leave a big tip. Go for it! Remember..love intentionally!!”