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day 1960: Wordsmiths

“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

Tom Stoppard, the playwright, wrote this in his play, “The Real Thing”; words are, “innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos”.  Stoppard’s quote reminds me of how little we value the wordsmiths within our companies. We tend to want to leave the wordsmiths in the communication or PR departments all the while we bungle through our words resulting in conflicts, misinterpretations,  misrepresentations, hurt and hard feelings, all because we have ignored the power of words to cause damage, sometimes irrevocable damage.  Last week, ESPN fired a radio host for his choice of words. We have national debates of character over the words that politicians use.  With just a little more respect and attention to how we use our words, we can turn negative to positive, insult to caring, oppression to freedom.  Let’s consider how we wordsmith within our company and our word choices.

You might think I am heading in the direction of James and Paul in how they teach us to use our words, but I’m not.  I would like us to think today about how our words can either ripen the fruits that come from the Holy Spirit, or cause those fruits to never ripen, or worse to rot.  Take a look at each of the fruits described in Galatians and consider how we should be asking God to help us wordsmith our lives so that we can bear the fruits of the Holy Spirit.  If we are struggling with our words, then we are surely struggling with how the fruits are being borne out of our lives.

Reference:  Galatians 5:22 (New Living Translation)