Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.
Proverbs 16:24 (NIV)
The Line You Still Have
A woman driving to the second shift has one line her sixth grade teacher said to her, word for word, with the weather and the time of day attached to it. She has the radio off and forty minutes of road in front of her, and there it is again. She couldn’t tell you one other thing about that year.
Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones. Bone is under the skin and under the muscle, holding up everything above it. A kind word gets down there and does its work at that depth. Honey was the sweetness they had in that country, and it did not spoil.
That is how it actually goes. A word said in a hallway doesn’t fix anybody’s week, and it goes in further than a week. Some people can quote a sentence decades later, and the lesson around it is long gone.
Memory keeps the other kind just as well, word for word, with the weather attached. Proverbs also describes a scoundrel who plots evil and carries it on his lips like a scorching fire. That is not the same as a remark that landed badly. You can get most of the way to work before you notice which one you’ve been playing back.
Honey is sweet, and a spoonful of it isn’t supper. A good word works at that depth longer than the person who said it will be around to watch. What was your line, and who said it to you?
Whoever said it may never have known it landed. The woman driving to second shift wrote to that teacher two Christmases ago, and four lines came back in handwriting gone shaky. The teacher didn’t remember saying it, and she was glad to be told.
A Prayer to Remember
Thank you for the people you put in front of me who had no idea what they were doing. One of them said a sentence to me in a hallway thirty years ago and it’s holding me up this morning. Let me go and tell her today what it did, and don’t let me put it off another year.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
