Proverbs 18:17-24: a reflection

17He who pleads his cause first seems right— until another comes and questions him. 18The lot settles disputes, and keeps strong ones apart. 19A brother offended is more difficult than a fortified city. Disputes are like the bars of a fortress. 20A man’s stomach is filled with the fruit of his mouth. With the harvest of his lips he is satisfied. 21Death and life are in the power of the tongue; those who love it will eat its fruit. 22Whoever finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favor of the LORD. 23The poor plead for mercy, but the rich answer harshly. 24A man of many companions may be ruined, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

This cluster of proverbs keeps circling one theme: the weight of our words. Death and life are in the power of the tongue, it says. Not just influence, but death and life, the power to give someone life with a word or to deal them a wound. What we say is never as weightless as it feels in the saying.

And notice the proverb nearby: a brother offended is harder to win back than a fortified city, and such disputes are like the bars of a fortress. A careless or cutting word can raise walls between people that are enormously hard to bring down again. We speak in a moment, and the hurt can fortify itself for years. The tongue builds fast and destroys fast, and its damage does not clean up easily.

That should make us handle our words with more care than we usually do. Before you speak the sharp thing, the true-but-cruel thing, the word that would win the argument but wound the person, remember that death and life are in your tongue, and that a brother offended is harder to reach than a walled city. Choose, today, to use your words to give life. It is one of the plainest ways you touch the people around you, for life or for death.

Lord, death and life are in my tongue, and I use it carelessly. Guard my words today. Keep me from the sharp thing that wounds and walls people off, and help me use my words to give life.