Last updated on June 9, 2020
The flower was dead, and I had killed it. If you looked closely enough though, this one flower appeared different than the others in the garden. Thanks to a clever camouflage job (if I do say so myself), this one flower looked perfectly normal, even though its stem had been repaired using masking tape.
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 and my basketball hoop. On this day, one errant shot ricocheted off the rim, straight into the garden, and mom’s fears became justified. The ball cleanly severed this flower’s stem about halfway up.
Realizing I still had about 45 minutes before she came home from work, I placed the two stem halves back together straight up and down, wrapped some masking tape around the break, and colored it using a green marker (told you it was clever).
Looking at the upright flower, I secretly hoped that somehow the stem would magically fuse back together. However, within 20 minutes, the upper part of the stem went limp, bending at the masking tape into a perfect upside-down U with the flower drooping toward the ground.
The flower was dead, and I was busted. Not only did the deception get me in trouble; my mother was disappointed because I did not 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 He put here and nurtured – with careless and idle words.
How much power do 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 is practically impossible to offer explanations or soothe the wounds 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 difficult at times, 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.