The Power of Words
by Keith Tan, Summer Missions Program staffPictured: Keith (left) passes out painting supplies to youth at the church nursery.
This summer I was able to work with some middle school youth from a church from the suburbs of Boston. One of our projects for the week was restoring a nursery room with peeling paint at a local church. We were scraping, spackling, and painting over the course of four days. My group was excited to start painting, but of course that's the last and shortest step, so we began scraping...
While we were getting started with the project, the youth were still not comfortable yet with me or each other, and not too talkative. I decided to grab a radio so we could listen to music while we work to make it more fun. After seeing that I was singing with a lot passion and inviting them to sing along with me, they were willing to move out of their comfort zone. We were singing and dancing while trying to complete our job. It made the work site a fun place to be and it didn't feel like we were working for a long time because time flew by so fast.
As we were singing and dancing, we started to share more about ourselves. At one point, I saw two of them whispering to each other and I asked them to share about what they were talking about. It seems that they were talking about another girl in their youth group and it was gossip about her. I was surprised to hear about that - it seemed that the girl was isolated from the group. Of course, I shared that it was not right to continue this gossip conversation any longer.
At lunch, I decided to open up a discussion about the harmfulness of gossip. I asked the youth what they thought about gossip and they responded saying it wasn't the right thing to do. I pushed them to go deeper, and asked questions about why that one girl made them felt that way. I wanted them to understand that they cannot just look at this story from one angle but we need to see it as a big picture. I thought it was not right for me to let this slide and since they were just in middle school, I wanted them to understand words may hurt people deeply. They come from the same church and could be close to each other like a family instead of gossiping and bringing one person down. We read a passage from 1 Corinthians about how we all should work together and that everyone is needed in the body of Christ.
The next day one of my youth shared that our conversation had changed her whole perspective. While I wanted to use this as a teaching opportunity, I was still amazed at how much my positive words could impact people. Even though I was preaching about how words can affect people deeply to the youth, I was also being taught the same lesson. I thought that it was simply amazing how both staff member and youth were going through the same lesson at the same time. I know that it was God who was doing the teaching for both of us, and it was awesome to see how everyone benefited.
