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On Wednesday evening with my confirmation small group, we talked about the lesson for that evening. The class currently is studying the 10 Commandments. Last Wednesday’s lesson was on the sixth commandment, “Thou shall not kill.” The lesson acknowledged the obvious that taking someone’s life is a great sin. Digging deeper, we also explored how this commandment might more directly affect them in their daily lives. We talked about killing someone with our words. In our small group, we watched the scene from the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles where Steve Martin’s character eviscerates John Candy’s character with his words. In the scene we see Neal (Steve Martin) verbally attack Del (John Candy) when he is just fed up with his situation, tearing down Del in a pretty extreme way. I haven’t watched that movie in a long time and watching that scene honestly made me feel pretty uncomfortable. Watching someone get so demoralized and hurt, hurt me to watch. I asked my students how it made them feel, and they all agreed, it really was uncomfortable to watch.
In a normal year, Rollie and I often go into schools and host a day of Compassion, where we teach young students about compassion, kindness, respect, and other good qualities to strive for. One of the lessons we talk about with our students is how our tongues and fingers (when typing) are impressively powerful tools. We can use these tools to very easily tear someone down, or build someone up. One of the key takeaways is that each and every one of us has an incredible power to make or break someone’s day by using these tools. It is a pretty simple thing to give someone a smile, a compliment, or just a reassuring word. Those words can truly save a life.
There is this story from the book, Chicken Noodle Soup for the Soul. It was about a boy who had cleaned out his locker and was carrying all his books home when a couple of guys ran into him on purpose to knock all of his books all over the place. As he went about picking them all up, another boy showed up to help him saying “hey man those guys were jerks, sorry about that.” They talked briefly and realized they lived pretty close to each other and started walking home together. The boy carrying all the books had gone to a private school before, so that was why they hadn’t met. As time went on they became great friends, and both excelled throughout high school. The boy carrying the books became the valedictorian in their class and gave a speech on their graduation day. He talked about a day that he had cleared all of his books out of his locker so that his mother wouldn’t have to. He had made an awful decision to kill himself, until a random boy he didn’t know stuck up for him and said, “sorry those guys were jerks,” and befriended him, literally saving his life with his words and actions.
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