Are You Speaking Words of Life or Death?

My mom never went to college, but you would never know it from her remarkable vocabulary. She loved words and the power they had to help her escape into a controlled reality or to solve a problem. She endured the shattering words of broken and hurting people as a little girl. As an adult, she loved to find words of life in the Bible to empower her to rise above her pain. Throughout mom’s life, the Bible remained her favorite book.

Mom’s lifeline out of despair started by hearing how much God loved her and that He promised “to never leave her,” from her Grandmother. Mom continued to pass this lifeline down to me growing up. She would take words from the Bible and explain their meaning at least once a week. She would also take a long word from the dictionary, one that was fun to say or hear, and use it in various sentences. She would ask me what I thought it meant as a guessing game. After I understood the meaning, we would have a contest to see who could use it the most during the week.

Little did mom know how much she was helping me in my life. Although I am an author now, I barely passed English in High School because we moved so much. I always got the creative writing half of English but not the sentence structure. However, through God’s direction for my life, my vocabulary lessons from mom, and my spurts of reading I can see how God was secretly preparing my mind to write and teach. I still can’t structure a sentence, so don’t ask. However, I can tell you a story from my heart. I can share how God has empowered me to break through and rise above fear, guilt, shame, low self-value, and self-sabotage. I can show you God’s words to help you see how He treasures and cherishes you. I can show you how God proves you are worth dying for because He let His Son die for you. I can show you God’s promises to never leave you or forsake you, and therefore you do not have to be afraid.

In childhood, words are the tools of discovery, learning, and understanding, but they can also paralyze, degrade, and imprison us with untruths. As we become adults, we have the power to choose the words we want to weave in other people’s hearts and minds as well as our own. What if we became determined to use only words of life? How would this decision change your life, your community, and your world?