“Don’t be in any rush to become a teacher, my friends. Teaching is highly responsible work. Teachers are held to the strictest standards. And none of us is perfectly qualified. We get it wrong nearly every time we open our mouths. If you could find someone whose speeech was perfectly true, you’d have a perfect person, in perfect control of life.”James 3: 1 – 2 (The Message)
Why is James talking about teaching? After forcing readers to examine their actions, James is now turning to an even trickier area: our tongues and the ways in which we use them. James is introducing the challenge of the tricky tongue by mentioning a profession in which people must routinely speak thousands if not millions of words every day in front of their classes.
Want to find out how IMPERFECT you are? Just become a teacher! As soon as you stand in front of a classroom, you find yourself questioning why you are there and why you think you have anything to share in the first place. If you don’t question yourself, your students or their parents, or the community, or the school hierarchy will do it for you sooner or later! There’s nothing easy about becoming a teacher!
One of my most useful experiences was teaching Junior High General Science to four classes of eighth graders and one class of seventh graders. Five times a day, I had to get up before classes of 28 -35 twelve and thirteen year – olds and try to hold their attention. The period immediately after lunch was particularly tough, when all my students wanted to do was to descend into food comas! But just because my students did not appear to be paying attention did not mean that they were not listening to everything and that they would not repeat everything I said. No, teaching is not for the faint of heart! Had I known Eugene Peterson’s description from The Message, I would certainly have agreed with it. “ And none of us is perfectly qualified. We get it wrong nearly every time we open our mouths.”
Why are our words so important? When I was a child, adults would quote this rhyme whenever we complained about someone insulting us at school: “Sticks and stones might break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” But that rhyme was a lie! In fact, the pain from being hit with a stick or a stone may go away quickly, but foul vicious words find their way into our spirits and can eat at our hearts forever. When my high school class was planning a reunion, one woman who was contacted responded by saying, “You didn’t care about me then, so I don’t care about you now.” How sad! This lady had been very quiet as a high school student, but someone had said something mean to her that continued to wound her.
Social media today has become a mine field of vicious comments, people responding to vicious comments, people responding to responses about vicious comments, etc. James was right; most of us get it wrong most of the time and there are no perfect people. Once something appears in print, it can be quoted and held against us. Let us be careful to make sure that our speech is salted with love.
PRAYER: Father God, help us to say only what you want us to, nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else. Help us to remember that the wounds we inflict with our tongues may be far more deadly than any other kind of wound. Help us to speak kindness and not hatred, to speak mercy and not judgement. In the matchless Name of King Jesus. Amen.
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