Day 28

A Wise Heart Uses Sweet Words: Adapted from Proverbs 16.20-24. Dear Lord, I pray that I may pay attention to Your Word in order to find good, and that I will be blessed as I trust in you. Give me a wise heart to be discerning, and give me sweetness of speech to increase my persuasiveness for Your will. Give me a wise heart to control my mouth. Give me kind and pleasant words to be like a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones, to those You put in my path today. In the name of Jesus, Amen.

When Dianne and I wrote Pray. Act. Pray Again, we each composed different commentaries on the passages. In the end, we commented that in rereading the book we could not always remember which passage we wrote. This is the only observation in the book that I am sure I wrote because the 90-year-old woman I mention was one of those “larger than life” people you never forget. The irony is—I never even met her. It was my first week as Senior Pastor of a new church, when I was asked to officiate at her memorial service. When her adult children described her to me, I found myself wishing I had known her. Her children showed me her Bible and all of the places she had marked. They told how those sweet words of comfort and joy she annotated where always on her tongue.

The most vivid memory I have is the way her son, who was a firefighter, had asked the police to escort her casket to the cemetery. In Virginia, people have to stop to let a funeral pass. So here we were, driving in this motorcade and escorting a woman of sweetness to her eternal life while stopping all of the traffic, which is always high-volume on Fridays in Northern Virginia. As we passed car after car, I saw an unexpected reverent politeness on the faces of the drivers. I felt sure that the woman we were transporting was delighting in knowing she had stopped traffic for a brief moment. She was reminding those who had to slow down that there is another destination for which they are preparing.

Pleasant words, sincere compliments, and honest affirmation were this woman’s legacy. What will be yours and mine? Will we be remembered as someone who lifted people up and shared the sweetness of the Good News of Jesus Christ?