“Do I have the grace to say so little?”
As I lay in bed early this morning listening to a book that I started last week, those nine words grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.
Literally, I stopped the narration and lay there in the silent darkness and repeated the question to myself.
“Do I have the grace to say so little?”
Maybe it was the phrasing that arrested me because we live in a fairly talkative society. It seems as if everyone is a content creator, and that means everyone is posting something that you and I need to read or watch.
RIGHT NOW!
I feel the pressure to have something to say, too. Obviously, I’d like for you to keep reading this. Heck, I’d like for you to read it and share it with a couple (million) people.
Did I say million?? Yes. Yes, I did.
But this author was suggesting that we can often find ourselves in situations where we can show more grace by saying a lot less. When I resumed the narration, I realized that she wasn’t suggesting it. She was saying it.
She wondered why we frequently feel the need to say every single thing in every single situation to teach every single person every single lesson.
We encounter someone hurting as the result of a bad lifestyle choice (maybe even a sinful one), and we feel the need to point out the obvious bad choice that led to the bad outcome.
Spoiler alert: the wounded person already knows they’re hurting, and also has a pretty good idea how they got hurt.
Perhaps, instead of saying all that, we could simply learn to say less, and in saying less, we may find that we’ve said what matters most.
“Jesus loves you. He would never treat you the way you’ve been treated.”
Ephesians 4:29 tells us to only say what others need to hear, and doesn’t give us permission to also say what we want to say, or want them to learn.
Do they need to learn it? For sure. But they have a better teacher than me or you. A quick look at John 16:13 shows us that God Himself will lead them into the truth they need. Even the truth that we might want to preach to them.
Sometimes, though, God is better able to speak His truth when we use less of our words.
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