God often wakes me up. That says a lot because I often go to bed quite exhausted.  I awaken frequently with a specific word from the Lord.  I have decided that if He will take the time to abruptly awaken me, then perhaps I should take the time to write down the spoken word. I am not apt to remember it in the morning if I return to my deep slumber.

Last night when I awoke, God gave me this sentence,

“Are you crushing him with your words?”

I think God awakens me in the the night because I am a bit too chatty in the day, even in my prayers. It is much harder to hear while my mouth is still moving.  I did jot the sentence down, but when I awoke there it was again, ever-before me in thought, “Are you crushing him with your words”?

A friend reminded me of the desperate need to support the people we love.  We can get that word ‘support’ skewed sometimes.  What does support really look like?

We esteem:

To teach.
To confront.
To encourage.
To admonish.

Webster’s Dictionary defines support as:

1. to bear or hold up, serve as a foundation for.
2. to sustain or withstand (weight, pressure, strain, etc.) without giving way; serve as a prop for.
3. to undergo or endure, especially with patience or submission; tolerate.
4. to sustain (a person, the mind, spirits, courage, etc.) under trial or affliction:
5. to maintain (a person, family, establishment, institution, etc.) by supplying with things necessary to existence; provide for: to support a family.

How I deeply desire to support my husband, to be blocks of his foundation, to be a strength, helping him sustain and withstand weight and pressure without him giving way. May my words never apply unnecessary pressure through the weight of expectation. Far too long that is precisely how I have operated- applying a heavy hand pushing him lower and lower to the ground. I do not hold him up in his trials. I press down on him.

I want him to endure with patience my inadequacies, but I tend to just tolerate his.

I want to sustain him under affliction, all of him. I never want to be a part of the big bad wolf’s legacy in blowing the house down. I want to lift him up, to strengthen the beams that keep our house safe and secure.

I won’t, for even a moment, entertain being a wife that will only do what is needed to merely co-exist.

1. A gentle tongue is a tree of life; but perverseness therein is a breaking of the spirit. ~ Proverbs 15:4
2. Death and life are in the power of the tongue; and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof. ~ Proverbs 18:21

Adversely, Webster’s Dictionary describes crush in this way:

crush:

1. to press or squeeze with a force that destroys or deforms.

I refuse to be the force that destroys my husband or deforms and disfigures parts of his identity or facets of our relationship due to words I haphazardly speak over him. Once they are out there, there is no getting them back. Perhaps I could just put a few less words out there?

Death and life are in the power of the tongue; and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.

If like me, you love words, you have the option to love them in death or in life, and I believe I have a pattern of the former not the latter.  If we are not breathing life into relationships with our words, then we are breathing death.  There is no in between.

The toxic way in which we speak to one another about someone else can be just as deadly, if not more so.

James 1:26- Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight reign on their tongues, deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless.

Ephesians 4:15 Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ.

May our words be sweet and few. May we uphold one another in love, strength, and dignity. And may we never, never, be the cause of the house that falls through the power of the unfortunate tongue.