Original air date: 10Apr2010
I have come to recognize the power of words ... the Bible calls it the power of the tongue, and that it holds the power of life and death. (Proverbs 18:21) In short, words matter! In an earlier post I talked about the power of speaking the truth vs the consequences of being a liar. When people come to know that they cannot trust what you say, that your words ring hollow in the other person’s ear because they have known you to lie just too many times, then you cease to have any kind of influence with that person. Frankly, I stop taking such a person seriously at all. When I know a person is a liar, or is willing to say whatever they think I want to hear (I don’t know why people say that, when they assume that people want to hear anything other than the truth,) then when they do say anything of importance, at *best* I doubt them, at worst I discount them altogether.
There used to be three words that scared me more than any other phrase to say. I still find myself battling this (more often than I’d like to admit,) because these three words tend to taste very bitter and uncomfortable in my mouth. The implications of these words are not typically the impression that we want to give others about ourselves. And the more I have noticed that the more I recognize this characteristic in myself and I work to grow out of this habit, the more I notice in others. Let me give you a recent example from my life:
Last Wednesday evening I went to the local home improvement store to get flowers to plant in little pots I have by my front door. These pots are up under the overhang and receive no direct sunlight, so I needed to find plants that grew well in all shade. Since all I really know about flowers is that they are all colorful and pretty, I am really not the best judge about which flowers need to be planted in different settings of soil or light or water, etc ... (which is why mot plants around me have an average lifespan of about a minute and a half. Except weeds.) So after I had wandered up and down every aisle in the Garden Department, reading the little tags on every plant on the shelf in hopes of finding a tag that said, “This plant is very hard to kill! It requires no direct sunlight, you don’t have to remember to water it regularly, and the soil condition doesn’t really matter either. It is guaranteed to bloom constantly and last for years.” *That* plant might survive a whole five minutes at my house. Still wandering around aimlessly, an employee came up to me and asked if I needed help finding something. Evidently I was wearing my ignorance on my forehead. I told her about what I was trying to find - flowers that would do well in all-shade pots under an overhang. After a lot of huhing and hawing, she proceeded to lead me up and down all the aisles I just wandered thru, randomly picking flower tags to read to see if they matched my description. After recommending a few flowers that asked for “at least 6 hours of sun,” I think she was catching on to my frustration. I think that was on my forehead too. She assured me that those little flower tags can’t really be trusted, that they call annuals perennials, and say some need sun when they really need shade and vice versa. But then she’d grab a tag and read me the whole thing for info. At one point she read the planting instructions on a certain flower said 10”-18”. I asked her if that meant there has to be that distance between individual plants or if that’s the size planter they go in. She assured me it meant the size planter the needed. So I reaffirmed, “So it doesn’t mean that there needs to be 10”-18” between plants for them to grow?” She said, “Yes, it means they need that much space between them.” OK, now she was just making stuff up. I was not impressed. I asked if there was someone else that could help me.
So why was she so afraid to say those three dreaded words, that I have stumbled over and avoided at all costs countless times in my own life?? Why on earth can we just NOT admit, “I don’t know” ??? This is definitely an area that I have had a double-standard on for many years in my life, without really even knowing it. Whenever I was around someone (like that Home Depot garden rep) who would just make stuff up as they went along, obviously not having a clue what they were talking about, it would drive me nuts. Whenever a person actually admitting, “You know, I don’t really know the answer to that question, but let me go find out,” that was always so much more respectable! Yet I never had the courage to give that answer myself - I always had to feel like I knew the answer to every question ever asked. I couldn’t admit I didn’t know the best way to do everything -- I might look dumb (my worst fear) or people would think I wasn’t as smart as I wanted to be. What I’ve learned is that you actually look worse to the people around you! Who do you respect more, someone who willing admits they don’t know the answer to something and helps you find the answer, or the person that acts like a know-it-all and leaves you wondering if you can rely on anything they tell you? I personally respect the former! I have to admit that this is another area in which Danny has directly influenced my growth - even though I was pretty reluctant to grow at times, especially in our early marriage. I wanted so badly to be the perfect girl for him, that knew how to cook anything (that dream died quickly) and knew which socket to use.
The bottom line of what I have learned is that people will actually respect you more and trust you more when you answer what you know and admit what you don’t. Have you ever gone shopping with a friend that says that everything you try on looks just great on you?? Well I don’t care who you are, not every piece of clothes is going to flatter your figure! After a little while, do you just quit asking for that friend’s opinion, because you know it’s always going to be the same answer and you can’t trust it? Although they are trying to be nice, I would rather have a friend be nice enough to tell me that if I buy those jeans I may as well be wearing a “Wide Load” sign. That’s a friend I can trust. I have learned that I feel more proud with myself when I can answer with confidence what I actually do know, and I feel more helpful as a friend when I help find the answer for them that I didn’t already know.
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