When my sister and I were kids, my parents owned a computer store. We would spend countless hours there, waiting until the golden time of 6 pm to go home for the night. We would get so bored sitting in the back room of the store. We’d watched all of our movies nearly a million times, worked all of our puzzles thousands of times, and cable usually only held reruns that we’d seen at least a hundred times.  We had to be creative. We played with duct tape … a lot.

I asked my sister if she would let me duct-tape her up, because I’d never done it before. She agreed, surprisingly, on the condition that the moment that she said stop, I would.  After choosing an office chair, I first taped her hands, and then her mouth, so she couldn’t tell me to stop… and then proceeded to her feet. I rolled her into a closet. I’m a horrible person, aren’t I?  I was laughing so hard that my mom soon became suspicious and came to see what I was up to.  Tears were running down my face because I was laughing so hard at my amazing idea.  Mom rolled her out of the closet and carefully pulled the tape off.  It hurt, as you can imagine it might.

I’m taking a prayer class right now at school, and the professor was talking about the importance of watching what we say. She simply put it “that words are like duct tape”. They can hinder, and they can help.

Has anyone ever called you stupid, or fat or any number of things that weren’t true?  But, because someone said them about you, you began to consider them as truth.  Maybe you just gave up on your grades because someone told you that you were stupid. Or maybe you decided to quit eating because someone told you that you were fat. Or something far less extreme… These false things can control you… they can even hinder you. Like being bound to an office chair with duct-tape, words affect us in powerful ways. We say they don’t—those things that people say about us to bother us, or even make us second guess ourselves.

Now think about what you’re saying.  Are they things that build up the people around you?  Ephesians 4:29 says, “Don’t use any foul or abusive language. Let everything you say be good and helpful, so that your words will be an encouragement to those that hear them.” (NLT)

James talks about the power of the tongue.  He compares it to the bit in a horse’s mouth, a rudder in a ship, and the spark that brings a wildfire.  He goes on to say, “People can tame all kinds of animals, birds, reptiles, and fish, but no one can tame the tongue.” (James 3:7-8)

What are you joking about? What do you playfully accuse your friends about? Working on skillfully using our words to build the people around us up is a definitely a challenging task, but we can lean on Christ to help us. It’s worth the challenge.

Don’t duct-tape people with your words.

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