Breakfast at Tiffany’s: Which am I?

With it [the tongue] we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so. James 3:9-10,

            My dad once tore out an inspiring poem in the local newspaper and taped it to the bedroom mirror. I often read the thought-provoking poem myself when I would be in my parents’ bedroom. There came a time when I was a young adult that my parents moved away and I moved into the home I had grown up in. One of the things they left behind was the bedroom mirror with the carefully torn article still hanging there, now faded and discolored with age. I took it down and put it in a keepsake box. I still have it to this day. It reads:

Which am I?

I watched them tear a building down;

A gang of men in a busy town.

With a mighty heave and a lusty yell,

They swung a boom and a side wall fell.

I said to the foreman, Are these men skilled

As the men you’d hire if you had to build?

He gave me a laugh and said, No indeed!

Just a common laborer is all I need.

And I can wreck in a day or two

What it took the builder a year to do.

And I thought to myself as I went my way,

Just which of these roles have I tried to play?

Am I a builder who works with care

Measuring life by the rule and square,

Or am I a wrecker as I walk the town

Content with the labor of tearing down?

-Author Unknown-

            The New Testament book of James includes a dynamic discourse on taming the tongue. In chapter three, James discusses the duplicity of a tongue that blesses God while cursing people – people who are made in His likeness. He then exclaims, “This should not be so!”

            Which are you? Are you careful to use your words to build others up? Or do you carelessly allow negativity and hurtful words to spout forth without weighing the consequences they will have in someone else’s life? Let us pray that our Father will help us be builders and not wreckers when it comes to the things we say to others.