Mind Your Tongue

 

 I was rolling out pie crust the other day and had a flashback of myself as a pre-teen sitting in my neighbour's kitchen while she demonstrated the art of pasty making.  There were eight or ten of us, all members of a 4-H homemaking club.  The leader, my neighbour, was having trouble with the pie crust.  It kept tearing.  She was doing her best to instruct us girls on the finer points of pastry while trying to repair the holes that appeared in her pie crust.  A school chum sitting next to me snickered behind her hand and made rude comments.
    Our neighbour was a busy farm wife with hundreds of tasks awaiting her attention.  She received no monetary recompense for teaching a batch of smart-aleck school girls.  She didn't even have a child of her own to benefit from the 4-H club.  She deserved our gratitude, not our ridicule.
     The Bible is rife with  instructions to guard our speech. James 3:8, Matt 12: 36-37, Ephesians. 4:29. 1 Peter 3;10, Ps 34:13, to reference a few. 
       Malicious talk is ungodly, it is damaging to the community and it is hurtful to the victim.  What I realized, as I rolled out pie crust, some fifty years later, is that a nasty tongue is harmful to the speaker as well.  That incident has stuck in my mind all these years, and my memory of my school chum has been tarnished forever by her unkind words.  
      I remember telling my pal to hush lest she be heard.  I wish I had told her to hush because she was doing wrong. Col 3:16.