Christmas pressures have a way of bringing out the real you. Have you noticed?
I’m at the mall Christmas shopping. I’m waiting at the curb. A car pulls up. A dear, sweet, old, grandmother-type opens the door and gets out. Her husband is dropping her off so she won’t have to walk far.
What happens next I will never be able to get out of my mind. If I had this scene on YouTube it would go viral. She puts her purse over her shoulder and closes the door. Her husband sees a parking place open up close-by. He is checking his rear-view mirror to see if he can dart over there. He does not look back at his wife, but he hears the door close and assumes it is safe to drive away. He guns his engine to be sure he gets the coveted parking spot before anyone else can. His haste will cost him.
What he does not see is that when the door closes his wife’s purse strap is caught in the door. She has the purse securely over her shoulder. When he races away she is spun around and thrown to the ground. I run out to help her to her feet, but see refuses my hand, ignores me. She scrambles to her feet and begins to vomit out vile profanity. I back away to a safe distance.
He parks the car. She stalks over and gets in. He sits at the wheel staring silently forward. I walk out to my car and drive back carefully to pick up my family. When I pass the car I can still hear her using her bar-room vocabulary on him.
She looked for all the world like a sweet little old lady… until she opened her mouth. Then everyone within a city block knew that her heart was as foul as a sewer.
Jesus said a good person out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things but an evil person out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil things. I want my heart to be a treasure of good things–even when I skin my knee–at Christmas.
Ken Pierpont
Granville Cottage
Riverview, Michigan
November 26, 2012
How true. I need often to repent and count it joy, strange word, when I fall into or from diverse trial and testings.
So anybody using foul language has a heart as foul as a sewer? I don’t think it’s appropriate to confound profanity with being an evil person.
Jesus said so Katie: He said; “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks and by our words will will be judged…” Someone said; “The tongue is the dipstick of the heart.”
Right, but how do you know that passage pertains to foul language? THere’s also a difference between using the Lord’s name in vain and swearing- though you didn’t elaborate which she did. Perhaps she curses like a sailor but is a blessing to many people in her life. Letting loose a string of explicatives after a fall is hardly equivalent to being a terrible person. There are certainly people with kind hearts who speak roughly, as well as people who never let even a mild word pass their lips but might be lacking in other ways.
Did Jesus say “the tounge is the dipstick of the heart”? No. I’ve noticed a pattern of you judging others superficially, your posts are frequently in regards to the “heathens” you encounter in public, judgements based on an interaction of the span of maybe a couple of minutes.
Or- another possibility occurred to me- she could be losing her mental faculties. My great aunt’s vernacular took a drastic change for the worse before she passed away. None of it her fault, as she wasn’t fully there.
That’s something to think about Katie. Read Ephesians 4 and 5 on pure speech. You might also listen to my messages in good and bad swearing. You can search for them my site. Let me know what you think.