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The Best Words
Do you talk too much? I do.
Oh, I didn’t always talk like this.
As a teenager, I’d wonder what I should say,
and now, as a grandmother,
I wonder if I go on too much.
I talk to complete strangers.
I talk to my cat.
I talk.
Nothing very important.
Maybe, if we had fewer words at our disposal, we’d say only the truly important things in life.
That happened once.
A “once” I’ll never forget:
I was shopping in a crowded grocery store in Florida with my six kids, all then quite young.
Shopping with six little kids and very little money. Mayhem comes to mind.
From the crowd, a woman approached me and held up a sign. We careened to a stop. My baby was crying. The three and six-year-olds weren’t feeling charitable. Mayhem.
The woman was a deaf-mute. We gave her a few pathetic coins and she started to move on when it hit me. Here was a woman with whom I couldn’t speak, yet shouldn’t I try to communicate something?
It came to me that a friend at church had been teaching the children the song “Jesus Loves Me” in sign language, during the children’s time.
Slowly, I signed, “Jesus Loves You.”
The look in her eyes warms me still, all these years later.
It occurred to me that they were the only three words that I knew in her “language” and yet with thousands of words at my disposal in English and among all the hearing people I knew, how few people had I truly told of God’s love. Far, far too few.
I’m trying to say less these days. No, I’m not great at it yet. I’ll still talk to you at the grocery store, even if you’re a complete stranger. I still talk to my cat.
But–with God’s help–I can use His Words, His Power, His Love and tell others of His plan of salvation, of His forgiveness of sins, of eternal life. We can tell them, Yes Jesus loves you. He loves me. He loves us all, the silent, and the talkative, …enough to die for us.
Yes, Jesus loves you. He truly does—
—and they are the best words, I’ll ever say.
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God’s Word is full of guidance in the use of words.
34 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” John 13:34 KJV
24 Pleasant words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the bones. Proverbs 16:24 NKJV
Share His words and His love with everyone you meet.
I would like to encourage you to read, “The Power of Talk.” It shares many ways we can use words to reach people for God.