Prepare or Perish, pt 1 – Chatting

The famous escape artist, Harry Houdini was a master showman who started his dazzling career as really little more than a glorified locksmith. The art he perfected was staging circumstances with lethal consequences, from which he would then escape with death-defying dexterity. The more inescapable the incarceration seemed, and the more perilous the consequence, the more satisfyingly miraculous the escape would appear.

Throughout his illustrious career, his stunts became increasingly impressive. One act began as an escape from a giant milk can, and evolved into one of his more spectacular demonstrations: the cuffed and shackled Houdini was stuffed inside the man-sized milk can, which was then enclosed in a nailed and chained wooden crate, and dramatically dropped into a river with 2,000 pounds of lead attached to it. In less than a minute the nonplussed artist would emerge unshackled from the water, while the box would be hoisted by a crane and found to be unbroken, still locked shut, with the leg-irons left inside.

Houdini was not, however, invincible.

One of his claims was that he could endure any blow to the stomach, no matter how hard. He regularly challenged professional boxers to punch him in the gut, as he stoically and unflinchingly absorbed the blow. But on October 31, 1926, after a tiring show, Houdini was reclining in his dressing room when a university student asked him if it was true he could withstand any blow. He casually affirmed the claim and the young man suddenly hit the unsuspecting Houdini in the stomach several times at full force. Without the chance to prepare for the impact, the great Houdini was rendered as vulnerable as a turtle on its back. The trauma burst his appendix and died.

 

There are many spiritual activities we engage in so frequently that we neglect to do the necessary preparation to capitalize on the experience. Here are four areas in my spiritual life in which I have found intentional preparation helpful.

1. Preparation for Chatting

Idle conversation is an activity that is so much part of the warp and woof of our lives that we seldom realize how much of it has the potential to do good or harm.

Matt 12:36 I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak.

James 5:5 So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire!

As a pastor, I am used to utilizing a short pause for collecting my thoughts and darting up a brief prayer before a counseling appointment or making a phonecall, but it is the casual, incidental encounters throughout the day that lay traps for ungodly speech.

Phone calls sporadically interrupt your thoughts all day long like a long line of tempters, unplanned encounters at the grocery store jump at you like a ninja, and then there are the countless drive-by verbal exchanges you have with your spouse and the hit-and-run instructions you bark at employees.

The path to taming the tongue to simply do a rolling stop before accelerating into chit-chat of any kind, and consider what the most appropriate words would be.

 

I know it doesn’t sound practical. If you had a moment of meditation to engage your spiritual core muscles before every utterance that emanated from your mouth, you would spend a lot of your week in halting pauses, like that kid Fred Savage played in The Wonder Years who was always standing there speechless while his future self narrated his thoughts. People might think you were slow. But it is a command in Scripture, it can be obeyed with an infusion of God’s grace.

Col 4:6 Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person. 

Just picture how intentional your conversations would be if you had the undervalued superpower of being able to simply think before you speak. And think of how many insensitive remarks, off-color innuendos, and blatant half-truths you could avoid with a little mental bracing.

It helps to have an AA sponsor of sorts, or accountability partner, in Christianese. My wife graciously fulls this role for me (with enthusiasm). She periodically reminds me to prepare for conversation before we go out to dinner with friends, have people over for a Bible study, or whenever we know I’ll be tempted to dominate conversation, or draw attention to myself, or otherwise abuse my tongue. This exercise usually jogs my memory ask questions of others, listen courteously, and reply with encouraging words or a biblical perspective on the discussion, instead of my own (oft-unsolicited) opinions.

Those of you who know me well might find it hard to believe that I take time to think before I speak. My feeble reply is, “Can you imagine how bad it would be if I didn’t?!”

The other three to follow…

2. Preparation for Church

3. Preparation for Children

4. Prepare for Chilling