This is the question I have been asking myself lately. If you have been saved any length of time, you know that God does not always do things the "quick and easy way"...sometimes He does things the long and tedious way...the way that builds character in various lives along the way. There is usually a section of verse that kind of gets "stuck" in my head from a sermon, and it just sits there for a few weeks, and it slowly changes me from the inside out. Pastor preached on Mothers Day on Proverbs 31...or maybe it was a radio preacher? Anyway, somewhere I heard this verse...one I have read probably literally a hundred times before, but this time it stuck: "and in her tongue is the law of kindness."The law of kindness. Wow. It sounds so serious...so important! Is the law of kindness in my tongue? The tongue is a difficult thing to control..surely that is true even according to James...but if I can do one thing, it is to try to make every word I say be kind.
Sometimes kindness is not saying what someone wants to hear. Agreeing with error may be "nice", but it is not kind. Sometimes it is very hard to be kind when you are being treated unfairly, or thought evil of. At those times, I need to not say anything. Like Thumper's mother always told him..."If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all!" Kind words can even be hurtful, considering one of my all time favorite verses: "Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful." Confrontational loving and careful, Spirit-led correction, can wound, yet be kind.
However, the majority of time, kind words should be just that: kind. Gentle, sweet, nice - I ask myself, and I hope to make this a habit, "Was that kind?"
