Power of Words

A soldier was finally coming home after having fought in Vietnam. He called his parents from San Francisco.

"Mom and Dad, I'm coming home, but I've a favour to ask. I have a friend I'd like to bring home with me."

"Sure," they replied, "we'd love to meet him."

"There's something you should know," the son continued, "he was hurt pretty badly in the fighting. He stepped on a land mine and lost an arm and a leg. He has nowhere else to go, and I want him to come live with us."

"I'm sorry to hear that, son,” the parents said. “Maybe we can help him find somewhere to live."

"No, Mom and Dad, I want him to live with us."

"Son," said the father, "you don't know what you're asking. Someone with such a handicap would be a terrible burden on us. We have our own lives to live, and we can't let something like this interfere with our lives. I think you should just come home and forget about this guy. He'll find a way to live on his own."

At that point, the son hung up the phone. The parents heard nothing more from him.

A few days later, they received a call from the San Francisco police. Their son had died after falling from a building.

The grief-stricken parents flew to San Francisco and were taken to the city morgue to identify the body of their son. They recognized him, but to their horror they also discovered something they didn't know - their son had only one arm and one leg.

A group of frogs were travelling through the woods. Two of them fell into a deep pit. All the other frogs gathered around the pit. When they saw how deep the pit was they told the two frogs that they were as good as dead. The two frogs ignored the comments and tried to jump up out of the pit with all of their might. The other frogs kept telling them to stop, saying that they were as good as dead.

Finally, one of the frogs took heed of what the other frogs were saying and gave up. He fell down and died. The other frog continued to jump as hard as he could. Once again, the crowd of frogs yelled at him to stop the pain and just die. He jumped even harder and finally made it out. When he got out, the other frogs and said, “Did you hear us?” the frog explained to them that he was deaf. He thought they were encouraging him the entire time.

There is the power of life and death in the tongue. An encouraging word to someone who is down can lift them up and help them make it through difficult times. A destructive word to someone who is down, can be what it takes to kill the, speak life to those who cross your path.

In the Solomon Islands in the south pacific some villagers practice a unique form of logging. If a tree is too large to be felled with an axe, the natives cut it down by yelling at it. Woodsmen with special powers creep up on a tree just at dawn and suddenly scream at it at the top of their lungs. They continue this for thirty days. The tree dies and falls over. The theory is that the hollering kills the spirit of the tree. According to the villagers, it always works.

Ah, those poor native innocents. Such quaintly charming habits of the jungle. Screaming at trees indeed. How primitive. Too bad they don’t have the advantages of modern technology and the scientific mind.

Me? I yell at my wife. And yell at the telephone and the lawn mower. And yell at the TV and the newspaper and my children. I’ve even been known to shake my fist and yell at the sky at times.

Man next door yell at a stepladder for most of an afternoon. We modern, urban, educated folks yell at traffic and umpires and bills and banks and machines especially machines. Machines and relatives get most of the yelling.

Don’t know what good it does. Machines and things just sit there. Even kicking doesn’t always help. As for people, well, the Solomon Islanders may have a point. Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts….

There was a little boy with a bad temper. His father gave him a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, to hammer a nail in the back of the fence.

The first day the boy had driven 37 nails into the fence. Then it gradually dwindled down. He discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence. Finally the day came when the boy didn’t lose his temper at all. He told his father about it and the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to hold his temper.

The days passed and he young boy was finally able to tell his father that the nails were all gone. The father took his son by the hand and led him to the fence, he said, “you have done well, my son, but look at the holes in the fence. The fence will never be the same. When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a man and draw it out. It won’t matter how many times you say I’m sorry, the wound is still there.”

A verbal wound is as bad as a physical one. Friends are a very rare jewel. Indeed, they make you smile and encourage you to succeed. They lend an ear, they share a word of praise, and they always want to open their hearts to us. 

A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet.

He held up a sign which said “I am blind, please help.”

There were only a few coins in his hat.

A man walked by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat.

He then took the sign, turned it around and wrote some words.

He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by will see the new words.

Soon the hat began to fill up.

A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy.

That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were.

The boy recognised his footsteps and asked “Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? What did you write?”

The man said “I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way.” What I had written was “Today is a BEAUTIFUL day and I cannot see it.”

Lesson 1: Be thankful for what you have. Someone else has less. Help where you can.

Lesson 2; Be CREATIVE, INNOVATIVE, THINK DIFFERENTLY. There is always a better way!

A man found an eagle’s egg and placed it under a brooding hen. The eaglet hatched with the chickens and grew to be like them. He clucked and cackled; scratching the earth for worms; flapped his wings and managed to fly a few feet in the air.

Years passed. One day, the eagle, now grown old, saw a magnificent bird above him in the sky. It glided in graceful majesty against the powerful wind, with scarcely a movement of its golden wings.

Spellbound, the eagle asked, “who’s that?”

“That’s the king of the birds, the eagle,” said his neighbour. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to earth – we are chickens.”

So the eagle lived and died a chicken for that’s what he thought he was.