That’s jacked up!

I was hanging out with my nieces and nephew a few weeks back, and as I was sitting coloring with one of my nieces, I heard the voice of my sweet little two year old niece in the other room. She was playing quietly and I overheard her saying to her little doll…. “that’s jacked up” “that’s jacked up!”. 😳 Uh, hmmm.

These little ones hear everything. Even things that we say that we don’t see as an issue, when heard coming out of the mouth of a two year old, sounds well, embarrassing! I SO hoped I could blame that one on her dad (my younger brother) and not worry that she may have picked it up from her Aunt Jeni…. Oops. My bad. His bad. Your bad. Like how I include all of us in this scenario? Perhaps Oma doesn’t need to be included, but the rest of us, I am guessing…. yes?

Who deemed a word or phrase to be bad anyway? There certainly are a lot of them, and I, personally, used to toss them around back in the day like I was a sailor straight off the ship. I think I thought it was “cool” and never realized how repulsive I sounded.

No judgement here, if you’re the sailor now. I would mention that there are a TON of adjectives to describe anything in general, so maybe picking one that your mother would approve of wouldn’t be too hard to come up with… well, maybe it’s your mother that curses like a sailor.  Enter “your mom” joke here ________________.  Maybe we consider being considerate around those who are old school, like my mom. Examples of her frustration words are: oh my stars! oh heavens! gee wiz, gads (gads?), golly!…  What is this, Leave it to Beaver? Yes! That generation wasn’t dropping the F-bomb just to describe the weather, seriously! I don’t know about you, but I kind of prefer the “fill in” words that would have the same impact as the actual “bad” word, but are not actually “bad”. Is there a difference?  Dang. Darn. Flipping.  Verrrry similar, but not. Hmmmm…. that’s a debate I will have to have with myself and probably my Maker.

The Bible talks about cursing. It talks about not doing it. I think I am on the – let’s stop the cursing bandwagon today, because I was at the airport recently and there was a person on their phone talking loudly and this person was dropping some vulgar four letter words without hesitation. Did I mention they were talking loudly? In a crowded area? I imagine that if my mom was with me at that time, that I would have had to say something. She wasn’t. I did think something though.

I thought for a bit and decided if something we say gives us cause to look back over our shoulder, well then, we might just want to think about not saying it at all. I believe that to be truth that I need to swallow just as much as anyone else out there.

The verse below is the first verse I ever memorized (about 10 years ago). I taped it to my computer monitor (they were still huge in-your-face-monitors back then) and the verse went allllll the way across the top of my screen. I worked for a pastor at the time (now a longtime friend) and I am sure he certainly knew that this was the first verse that I needed to expand my memorization skills on. Discretion was not my strong point. Still working on that.

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.                -Ephesians 4:29  NIV