October 2013
My dining room table, Nashville, Tennessee
She was standing outside, leaning against the wall of the fast-food restaurant we always passed on the way back to our neighborhood. She looked upset, so I slowed down, and my friend Heather said, “Hey, stop. Something’s wrong.”
I turned into the parking lot and parked beside the girl. I sat in the car while Heather got out and slowly approached the teenager, who was on her cell phone. She was bawling. Absolutely undone.
I couldn’t hear them; Heather just wrapped her arm around the girl and spoke and listened. About seven minutes later she got back in the car. The girl stayed where she was, still on the phone.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“I don’t know. She never said. I just told her it was going to be okay, that God loved her, and then I prayed for her.
“I don’t even know her name,” Heather said.
We got back on the road and kept driving, headed to a going-away party for a friend. Heather never mentioned that girl or that moment again, but I think about it all the time.
I wonder about that girl.
I wonder about the impact Heather had that day when she was brave enough to get out of the car and comfort a stranger.
I don’t wonder if it mattered; I know it mattered. I know her courage changed that hurting girl. Our words always matter.
If we go back to the book of Genesis, where the world began, we see that God started it all with words. He spoke, and things became. Light. Land. Lizards. All with a word. And we are made in his image. We speak, and things are created.
He was brave enough to make you, brave enough to make me, brave enough to make humans who would all break his heart.
Proverbs 18:21 tells us that our tongues have the power of life and death. I see that in my life. I see that in my friendships. I see that in the memories of past things said to me.
If there are seeds of courage living in all of us, waiting to bloom, words are the sun and the water that cheer on those seeds to their fullness.
Last year, I pressured about ten of my girlfriends to buy a month’s membership to a boot camp. We were going to get fit in April 2012 if it killed us.
(To be noted — it almost killed me.)
It was no regular boot camp. It was a boot camp outside at 5:00 a.m. about twenty minutes from our neighborhood. So each of us had to wake up in the early 4:00s and then go exercise before the sun was even up.
How I convinced these people to do it I will never know. But I did. And Monday through Friday we would carpool out to the middle of nowhere for squats and push-ups and running and sit-ups and other misery-filled experiences.
As the month went on, the teacher realized a couple of things about me:
1. I did not enjoy being there.
2. I am the class clown almost always.
So in typical teacher versus class clown behavior, she started putting me at the front of the line or calling on me to lead the stretches or staring at me all too often. I hated it. As much as I love being the center of attention, I do not prefer it when I’m exercising. Leave me alone and let me do my forty squats in peace, lady.
On one of the last days of the month, we had to complete an obstacle course. As was the case every day, I was the last person to finish. The end of the course was a sprint around cones while holding a weighted ball. I began, and the teacher ran beside me, absolutely screaming in my ears.
YOU CAN DO THIS, ANNIE!
DON’T QUIT NOW. YOU ARE SO CLOSE!
YOU WOULDN’T HAVE MADE IT THIS FAR A FEW DAYS AGO!
FINISH STRONG!
As much as I hate to admit this, it worked. Her words in my ear gave me the push I needed to complete the course, get in my car, and never come back to boot camp again.
Just kidding. I went back for the last two days.
Even when you are at your lowest, like I was in that last leg of boot camp torture, the place where you think no one can help, a kind word can go a long way to heal and to rescue and help you finish.
I sat with my counselor two weeks ago, and, as counseling appointments tend to go, I verbally vomited everything I had been processing for the weeks since our last meeting.
When I was done, she looked me straight in the eyes and told me it was okay to mourn.
“Wait,” I said. “I don’t think I agree with that. I think I’m supposed to be fine that this is God’s plan and that I trust him and that he is working all things . . .”
She interrupted me.
“The dreams you thought would come true in a certain time frame never did. You saw a life for yourself that you will never have. You can mourn that loss.”
No one had ever said that to me before.
But I needed to hear it.
Kate and I sat down to a lunch of meat and two veggies at the local place that is just a short three-minute walk from my house. I told her how this one situation with a dude hadn’t worked out at all, but there was hope over here and hope lost over there.
“I just really think it’s gonna work for you one day, Annie. I do.”
I needed to hear that.
I needed to hear that I wasn’t alone in my joys and my sorrows. It was brave of them to say the thing — to give me permission and hope, and both of those conversations built something in me.
Your words matter. The statements you make to others, the ones that get planted in people and cause something new to grow, that require a little more courage? They matter. There are things that I need my people to say to me in this season of my life, just like there are things my people need me to say to them in their season.
For the month of October 2013, I chose to write about “31 Ways to Speak Love” on my blog, and October 17 happened to be the day of a post encouraging my readers to say a random word of kindness. I wrote it on a day when my real life was kinda spinning out of control — unhappy friends, scheduling mistakes, big meetings to plan for, financial worries. On my side of the screen was hurt and chaos, and yet I had to type and publish encouragement and normality onto the world wide web. So I did.
Not many minutes later, Adam texted me. “Random word of kindness,” he began. And for about three more sentences, he spoke into my career and my life and reminded me why I’m here. The timing couldn’t have been better or more godly. I swallowed the words like medicine, knowing they would heal and grow something in me.
“Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones” (Proverbs 16:24). And to say gracious words is brave. To speak life into someone else takes courage. Whether you are correcting in love, standing up for the voiceless, praying for the sick, or praising and loving others, your words are changing the atmosphere.
Don’t be afraid. Be brave. Say the things that will speak truth and heal. Hold your tongue in anger or fear — those are the times when a coward speaks. But when the moment comes to say the gracious thing that will mark a heart forever?
Say it.
Speak love, and watch as beautiful things come to life.