“Are you calling me a liar?”
When I was younger I had a bit of a silver tongue. I figured out early, as a teenager, that kindness and sweet words got a whole lot further with people than negative ones. So I used them. I told people what I appreciated about them. I ask told girls they were pretty.
One looked at me one day and said, basically, “That’s not true.”
I said, “Are you calling me a liar?”
She said, “Well, you’re saying all of this about me.”
And I told her something I still believe: just because it’s nice, and it’s sweet, doesn’t mean it’s untrue. You can say good things about people and have them be true at the same time.
I was already a Christian by then, so there was a moral floor under all of this. But I knew what I was holding. I had the ability to make people feel really good, or really bad, with nothing but the things I said to them.
Sometimes the truth is flattering. Sometimes it sucks.
I decided back then that I needed to be as truthful as I could be and highlight the positive things. I didn’t want to lie to people, and I didn’t want people to think my silver tongue was only there to persuade them into giving me my way.
The world is full of people who are so good at talking that they can get virtually anything they want, because there’s no moral behind what they do. I didn’t want to be one of them.
But here’s the other half, and it’s the half I had to learn later. Sometimes the truth is a very flattering thing. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the truth sucks, and we have to be told it by people who love us, in a way that frankly hurts our feelings and makes us see ourselves as we actually are, so we can change.
The same tongue we tear people down with is the tongue we build people up with. It’s one instrument. The difference is what’s behind it.
The fire and the forest
The Bible says life and death are in the power of the tongue. We can speak life over people. We can put roots under them. We can build an environment around a person with nothing but words, and not only spoken ones. The things we write count too.
James puts it more bluntly. The tongue is a small flame that can burn down a whole forest.
I’ve run a thought exercise in Toastmasters a few times. I ask the room to name the greatest public speakers of all time. The answers come fast: Jesus. Abraham Lincoln. Martin Luther King Jr.
Then I say: Adolf Hitler.
People recoil. I understand why. But the reason he was able to do what he did is that he could stand in front of a downcast nation and sell them a false picture of themselves that they wanted to believe. It gave the world the Holocaust. It was made of words, words delivered with malicious intent, and the words worked.
You don’t have to be moral to be good at speaking. You don’t have to be good to be good at communicating. That’s not a reason to distrust speech. It’s proof of how real the power is.
King’s “I Have a Dream” is the exact opposite of Hitler, built from the same material. He inspired people toward a day when all of us would be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. Same instrument. Same forest. One man burned it. One man planted it.
So I try to listen critically: to the words, who’s saying them, and why. I’d rather not get fooled.
Watch yourself
The harder half of that exercise points back at me. I have to evaluate my own messages the same way, because the only person I actually control is me.
The Bible says to speak the truth in love. Both words carry weight. The intention behind why we share something, why we point something out, why we try to say a good thing about a person, has to come from love, or we’re just holding an amazing power in our hands with nothing to govern it.
I want to be a person who watches himself, because I know what my words can do. I’m a representation of a God who loves me, and a lot of that representation starts with the words I choose to say.
That girl was right to push back. I’m glad she did. It made me decide, early, that if I was going to be good with words, I’d better be good.
