Hold your tongue. Watch your mouth.
If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
These are things we heard all the time as children, and likely, if you are a parent as I am, you are now saying them every day yourself.
We often hear a lot about what not to do, and what not to say, not just in church, but in the world, as a whole. As a mom of 4, I say No…a lot.
Don’t hit your brother. Don’t point. Don’t laugh when someone falls down. Don’t wipe your boogers on your brothers bed.
I’d say that the majority of my day is spent telling my children what not to do. Honestly, there isn’t a whole lot of time left over for instructing them in the things that they should be doing, so how will they learn?
Act in Love
My hope and my prayer in this, is that our actions will teach them more than our words ever could. When I think back on the people, thus far, who have had the greatest, most positive impact on my life, and even my salvation, it has nothing to do with what they said. We tend to put a lot of weight on words, and I don’t want to completely disregard that. There is truth to that. However, most people will quickly forget words. Most people cannot perfectly recall conversations. But they can almost always tell you exactly how someone made them feel.
Love is an active choice. It is taking action. It is not felt through the word, though it might be nice to hear.
”Do not waste your time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.” ~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Act in love. Your actions are capable of not only positively impacting someone else’s life, but your own as well.
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