The flower stood about one foot tall, straight up on top of a slender stem. If you looked close enough, though, masking tape held the stem together, camouflaged after being colored with a green marker. The flower had my attention because it was dead, and I had killed it.
My mother loved her gardens, and spent a lot of time nurturing them. She feared for the safety of her flowers in this particular garden, located a few short steps from the garage on which my basketball hoop was mounted. Her fears were justified when one seemingly harmless shot of the basketball ricocheted off the rim and shot straight into the garden. This one flower got cut down because of a careless shot from me. One careless shot.
Rather than facing my mother’s wrath, I placed the two stem halves back together straight up and down, wrapped some masking tape around the break, and colored the yellow tape using a green marker. I secretly hoped that somehow, someway the stem would magically and instantly fuse back together. However, within half an hour, the upper part of the stem went limp, and bent at the masking tape into a perfect upside-down U, and I was busted. Man, was my mother disappointed in me because I did not do enough to control the basketball near her garden.
In the same way, we disappoint God when we do not exhibit some restraint and self-control over the words we speak to other people and about other people. Just like I damaged one of mom’s prized possessions with one careless shot of a basketball, we all damage His prized possessions – people that He put here and nurtured – with careless and idle words. The Book of Proverbs says as much about the power that we wield with the words that come out of our mouths: “The tongue has the power of life and death” (Proverbs 18:21).
And once the damage is done, it can be practically impossible to offer explanations using the same mouth that caused the hurt in the first place. The only way that I could have stopped that basketball from killing that flower was to keep the ball from entering the garden in the first place. Although it’s tough in some situations, self-control is the key, because “he who guards his mouth and his tongue keeps himself from calamity” (Proverbs 21:23).
Which is a lot more effective than trying to patch things up with the verbal equivalent of masking tape and colored markers.
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Unconfined topics relating your world to His Word
Subscribe via email
Subscribe Now: Feed Icon
Search the entire Free Range
Labels
Copyright
Thanks for checking out Free Range Devotions!
Feel free to print a post in a non-commercial publication (like a church newsletter), link to this site or a specific post, or extract up to 100 words from a post on to another site, as long as you provide a link back to the original post and include the following notice: “©, Sean Connolly. All rights reserved. Originally published at http://freerangedevo.blogspot.com/.”
However, you must have written permission to repost or publish an entire post from my site anywhere on the internet, use a post for commercial purposes including selling or licensing printed or electronic versions of my content, or alter, transform or build upon the content of any post.
Feel free to print a post in a non-commercial publication (like a church newsletter), link to this site or a specific post, or extract up to 100 words from a post on to another site, as long as you provide a link back to the original post and include the following notice: “©, Sean Connolly. All rights reserved. Originally published at http://freerangedevo.blogspot.com/.”
However, you must have written permission to repost or publish an entire post from my site anywhere on the internet, use a post for commercial purposes including selling or licensing printed or electronic versions of my content, or alter, transform or build upon the content of any post.
