January: Created to Add Value
Day 8 — 8 January
The Weight of a Single Word
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.” — Proverbs 18:21 (KJV)
A friend of mine once told me about a teacher he had when he was eleven years old, a woman whose name he has never forgotten even though he has forgotten the names of almost every other teacher he ever had, and the reason he remembers her has nothing to do with what she taught him about mathematics or geography or the periodic table. He remembers her because of a single sentence she spoke to him on a Thursday afternoon in November, nearly thirty years ago, when she handed back a piece of writing he had submitted without much confidence and said, quietly enough that the rest of the class did not hear, “You have a way with words that most adults would envy.”
He told me that he stood there holding his exercise book and something shifted inside his chest, as though a door he did not know existed had just been unlocked, and from that moment forward he began to think of himself as someone who could write, which eventually led him to study literature at university, which led him to a career in publishing, which led him to a life that he loves and that has touched thousands of readers across three continents. And all of it traces back, if you follow the thread carefully enough, to seven words spoken by a woman in a cardigan who probably went home that evening and had her tea without any idea that she had just rerouted the entire trajectory of a child’s future.
I begin with that story because it illustrates, more vividly than any theological argument could, the terrifying and beautiful truth that Solomon compressed into a single sentence when he wrote, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”
Think about the sheer audacity of that claim for a moment, because Solomon did not say that the tongue has the power to encourage or discourage, which would have been remarkable enough. He did not say the tongue has the power to comfort or wound, which most of us would readily accept from our own experience. He said the tongue holds death and life, which are the two most absolute and most irreversible realities that any human being can encounter, and he placed both of them inside the same small, soft, boneless organ sitting in your mouth right now. The Hebrew word translated “power” here is yad (יָד, meaning “hand,” “authority,” or “possession”), and it literally means “in the hand of the tongue,” as though the tongue were a person with agency, someone who holds death in one hand and life in the other and extends whichever one it chooses toward the person standing in front of it. Solomon was not writing a proverb about the importance of polite speech. He was making a statement about the fundamental nature of human language, and the statement is this: your words are not decorations layered on top of reality. Your words create reality. They build worlds inside other people’s minds, and those worlds become the landscapes those people live in, sometimes for the rest of their lives.
That teacher’s seven words built a world inside my friend’s eleven-year-old mind, a world in which he was someone who had a gift, someone whose words mattered, someone with a future that included the possibility of doing something meaningful with language. And he moved into that world and lived in it, and it became so real to him that by the time he was eighteen he could not imagine inhabiting any other. But here is the part of this truth that should make us pause before we speak our next sentence: if seven words of life can reroute a child’s future toward flourishing, then seven words of death can reroute it just as decisively in the opposite direction, and most of us can name the sentence that did it to us, the casual remark from a parent, a friend, a colleague, or a stranger that lodged itself in the architecture of our self-understanding and has been quietly shaping the way we see ourselves ever since.
This is why Solomon paired the tongue with death and life rather than with lesser categories like comfort and discomfort, because the effects of human speech are not temporary or superficial. They are structural. A word spoken into the right moment, aimed at the right vulnerability, carries the power to reshape the internal architecture of a human being in ways that persist for decades, and the person who speaks it rarely has any idea of the weight they are placing on the air between their mouth and someone else’s ear.
The second half of Solomon’s proverb adds a dimension that most people skip over because the first half is so dramatic that it absorbs all the attention, but the second half is where the practical wisdom lives and where the connection to this year’s theme of adding value becomes most concrete. Solomon wrote, “and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof,” and the word “love” here is ahavah (אַהֲבָה, meaning “to love,” “to desire,” or “to delight in”), which tells us that the tongue is not neutral equipment that simply fires randomly throughout the day. The tongue follows desire. The tongue speaks what the heart feeds it, and the heart feeds it what the heart has learned to love. If you have learned to love speaking life, if you have developed a genuine appetite for words that build, restore, encourage, clarify, and strengthen, then you will eat the fruit of that love, which means you will live inside the world that your own life-giving speech creates around you. And if you have learned to love speaking death, if criticism comes more naturally to you than encouragement and your first instinct when you see someone’s work is to find the flaw rather than the strength, then you will eat that fruit too, because the worlds we build with our words are not only inhabited by the people we speak to. We inhabit them ourselves.
This is where the proverb stops being a general observation about communication and becomes something deeply personal and deeply challenging, because it forces you to ask yourself a question that most of us would rather avoid: what kind of world are you building with your tongue? Not what kind of world do you intend to build, or what kind of world do you believe in theoretically, but what kind of world are the actual words leaving your actual mouth on an actual Tuesday afternoon constructing in the minds and hearts of the people you actually interact with?
Think about your friendships for a moment, the people who know you well enough to have stopped performing around you, the ones who hear your unfiltered opinions, your offhand remarks, your casual observations about other people when those people are not in the room. What kind of world are you building inside those friendships? When you talk about a mutual friend who is not present, do your words construct a room that friend would feel safe walking into, or do they construct a room that friend would be devastated to discover existed? When your closest companion shares a fear or a failure with you, do your words build a floor under their feet or do they open a trapdoor? The answers to these questions will tell you more about the kind of value you are adding to the world than any amount of public generosity or visible service ever could, because the tongue reveals what the heart has learned to love, and the heart’s loves are most visible not on the platform but in the living room, not in the moments when everyone is watching but in the moments when no one is.
And this is where Solomon’s ancient proverb meets Jesus’ declaration from Day 3 with a force that neither passage carries on its own, because if you are the salt of the earth and the light of the world, then the primary vehicle through which your salt and light enter the lives of the people around you is your speech. Salt preserves, and your words can preserve someone’s dignity in a moment when the world is trying to strip it away. Salt brings flavour, and your words can bring richness to a conversation that was dying of blandness. Light reveals, and your words can illuminate a truth that someone needed to see but could not find on their own. Light dispels darkness, and your words can drive out the shadows of shame, self-doubt, and despair that have been accumulating in someone’s mind for years.
But the reverse is equally true, and the honesty of Solomon’s proverb demands that we sit with it rather than rush past it: if your words are careless, if they are critical without being constructive, if they traffic in gossip or sarcasm or the quiet destruction of other people’s reputations in rooms where those people cannot defend themselves, then you are using the same instrument that was designed to carry life as a vehicle for administering death, and the fruit of that choice will eventually appear on your own table, because Solomon said you will eat what your tongue produces, and that promise runs in both directions.
The Hebrew word for “fruit” is periy (פְּרִי, meaning “fruit,” “produce,” or “outcome”), and it is the same word used throughout the Old Testament to describe the tangible, visible, harvestable result of whatever has been planted. Fruit does not appear overnight, and it does not appear out of nothing. It grows from seed, and the seed your tongue plants every time you open your mouth is growing in soil you cannot see, inside the hearts and minds of people whose inner worlds are being shaped, for good or for ill, by the words you choose to speak over them and about them.
The thought to carry into this eighth morning of the new year is one that will change the way you speak to every person you encounter today if you let it settle deeply enough: every sentence that leaves your mouth is either constructing a world someone can flourish in or a world someone will have to survive, and the God who gave you the capacity for language designed it to be the primary instrument through which your salt and light enter the lives of the people around you. Your words carry weight, more weight than you have probably ever calculated, and the question is not whether they are landing on someone today but what they are building inside the person they land on.
Declaration
Every word I speak today carries the weight of life, and I accept that weight gladly because the God who gave me language designed it as the primary instrument through which I add value to the world around me. My tongue is not neutral ground; it is holy ground, a place where salt and light take the form of syllables and cross the distance between my heart and someone else’s, and I choose, deliberately and without reservation, to use it for construction rather than demolition. I build worlds with my words today, worlds that the people around me can flourish in, worlds where dignity is preserved and truth is spoken and encouragement is not rationed but poured out with the same generosity that my Maker pours into me. The fruit of my speech is life, because life is what I have learned to love, and the harvest of that love is already growing in soil I cannot see, inside hearts I am privileged to touch with nothing more and nothing less than the words I choose to give away.
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