James Was Right

The tongue is a fire. At least, it has that potential.

It was the writer of the Epistle (Letter) of James in the New Testament of the Bible who called the tongue a fire. He said that it is very small but can create immense blazes with a tiny spark. He went on to say that we cannot tame our tongues. I’m here to tell you that he was right on the money.

All my life I have had to live with a tongue that has a mind of its own. It goes into action of its own accord. I don’t have to decide to say something; my mouth is open and the words are coming out before I know what I’m going to say. (Friends ask me how I think of those things, and the truth is that I don’t “think” of them at all. I’m as surprised by my words as they are!) In fact, occasionally I don’t even know I’m going to say anything at all until I hear words coming out of my mouth. It’s all the worse if I’m saying something about things I don’t have all the facts about. I have, mostly unintentionally, done quite a little hurtfulness with my tongue during my life.

But that was predominantly in my first (pre-Encounter) life. I still have the difficulty, but it isn’t as bad as it used to be, in my second (post-Encounter) life, because one day I got smart and asked my Source to help me with my tongue. Sometimes He holds it so I can’t blurt out the wrong thing. Sometimes He puts words on it. Even now, if I am surprised by something, you can get the full flavor of my reaction or opinion. But overall, I have learned to recognize and heed the promptings Source has given me about my tongue. My speech can still get me into trouble, but I have had a much simpler life overall since Source took over my tongue.

I will never forget the first time Source rescued me from my, shall I say, straightforwardness. I had recently signed for a house and moved in. It was late spring and I was trying to plant some grass in the strip of lawn behind the house. Weeds had to be dug up, pulled up by the roots, soil had to be hoed and raked, and so on, and I was not accustomed to doing yard work. I asked a friend to come and help me. It was warm of course, downright hot in fact. (This was in Dallas, and even if you start in the morning you’re soon hotter than you want to be.) We hoed and dug and raked and pulled out weeds and I sweated and sweated. There was a moment when I became utterly exasperated with the heat in general and the project in particular. I needed to say something really nasty about how I was feeling, and I actually opened my mouth and drew breath to use language that was as hot as I was…and at that moment I thought, Good heavens, I can’t say that around Ken. Words started to come out, and they astonished me, for they said something like this: “I cannot believe that the pioneers cleared the land and started their farms without the tools we have today!”

Neither could I believe I had said that! It expressed what I was feeling, but it was totally removed from what I had intended to say. (Ken wouldn’t have said anything, but that language would have bothered him.)

There have been many times like that since.

There have been a few times also when I was apparently given messages for the people I was with. This time I was with Bill, in the car one time. We were driving home from work. (Sometimes he and I carpooled.) He was, like me, a trained musician and he was discouraged about his efforts to find work in his field. The car radio was playing “The Ride of the Valkyries”, and abruptly I was saying something like this: “I have no idea what’s going on in the opera here, when they’re doing this music, but it always makes me think of an army of grim-faced female warriors riding their horses to a big battle. Nothing will deter them. They will prevail one way or another.” And somehow the words connected that to Bill and his discouragement. I don’t remember what Bill said, but I think the words helped him. As I continued to drive, I started to feel as though I were breaking out of a dream or some odd waking state, and I was thinking, Did I really say that? Where did that come from, anyway? For lack of a better explanation, I concluded that Source had probably put those words on my tongue and spoken to my friend through me. He will do that; He speaks to us in all sorts of ways, often through others’ words or actions.

There have been moments in pressure situations – oral exams, job interviews – when I really didn’t know what I should say in answer to a question, but when I opened my mouth to try to come up with an answer…there it was, tripping out as though I had planned it.

There is a promise in the Bible that if we have to testify before the authorities, what today we might call the thought police or religion police, our words will be given to us. Now that is a Biblical promise I trust. I’ve experienced it too many times to react otherwise. We often have trouble with Biblical promises that we haven’t experienced in our own lives, or seen in the lives of those close to us. I do, at least. But this one I bet on. When I need control it is there. When I need words they are there.

It’s cool.

About Lists

I am a lover of lists. I make shopping lists. I make lists of household tasks to complete over a long weekend or a vacation. If I am traveling, I make a list of the things I want to pack for the journey. Lists order these things, provide a way to see what needs to be accomplished, and helps you track your progress as you work through the items.

I have a friend who is a mystic. She is a minister, a counselor, a teacher of centering prayer, and I value her wisdom. We met a few months before I left the big city to return to my rural roots, but we have kept the friendship alive via email and telephone calls. There were two or three emails that she sent me in which she wrote about the things she needs to do regularly in order to feel strong and healthy in all respects. I couldn’t help noticing that she always mentioned the same things. This lady really does know what she needs to do. Her lists usually began with centering prayer and sleep, and the other things assumed different places under those two priorities. I would call it a list on maintaining health, or self-maintenance. The complete list would be:

Centering prayer
Sleep
Diet
Exercise
Nature
Drinking water

At that time, I was going through a period in which I was trying to order my life around priorities, and I allowed her list to be one of my guides. But as I did my prayer journaling and worked through various things that happened, I came to develop my own list. If I call my friend’s list a “road map” to self-maintenance, I could call my own list a “road map” to restoring flagging energies, or self-restoration, because after I had followed her list, I still needed to restore energy. There is a smidgen of duplication in my own list, which I call a self-restoration list:

Centering prayer or prayer journaling
Creative activities of all kinds
Personal relationships
Closeness to nature
Solitude and silence

I went so far as to make a sign that shows both lists and tape it up where I see it several times a day. I honestly believe that a person who does these things daily will be healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. (Although I am a voracious reader, I do not include reading or study or even Bible study on the list because all this sneaks in through the other activities. Centering prayer can be done over a passage of scripture or some other writing, for instance, and in solitude and silence I will read and reflect.)

My friend with the brain tumor is having memory difficulties, and for some time I’ve known that she has a birthday present for me but forgets to bring it to church, which is where we usually see each other. (My birthday was in December.) The other day she gave me the present. I cherish the present itself, but it is the card that really got to me. My friend included in her note a list of qualities that a “Godly” life should have, and her list consists almost entirely of words of one syllable:

“To live a life of love, hope, peace, joy, health, trust and faith, and many prayers.”

Now there is a list for you! I would say that if I work to follow the first two lists, my life might actually come to illustrate the qualities on the final list.

So I took my sign down, re-did it to include the third list, and now it looks complete.