Words and Remembering

"The stroke of the whip maketh marks in the flesh:

but the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones.”

Words are powerful things, that stroke of the tongue: they can lift the spirits to heights you never thought possible, or bring you down into depths of sorrow you never knew existed. Whether we realize it or not, the words we use affects those we say them to-bad and good. I learned that very important lesson from a little friend today at school. After I teach in the morning, I stay into the afternoon session for a few hours making phone calls and filling out paperwork. While I was there today, the afternoon teacher encountered a situation with a student. My little friend got mad at the assistant teacher for something (I couldn't ever get the whole story, just that he upset him) and said some pretty awful things to him in his anger. The words he used and where he learned them is a whole other story...let's just say they would have been appropriate for....well, to me it would never be appropriate to use those words, no matter HOW angry you are. When I sat down with him to help him figure out better words he could use and to talk about what he was feeling, and he told me what he had said-as he said those words to me just in re-telling, they were piercing. I can only imagine how his teacher must have felt who he said them to with such passion and meaning. I was reminded of how powerful they can be: WORDS. How many times we say things not realizing there implication on anyone but ourselves, how uplifting and sustaining or how damaging they can be. It's all in the way we choose, what we choose to allow to come out of our mouths. What does this have to do with how I have seen the hand of God in my life today? Well, in dealing with this situation in my daily tutorial my mind turned to how the Lord has blessed me to change things in me that I did not like-many characteristics of the 'natural man' that gratefully the Lord has continue to chisel away at until, one day, I pray, I will be the person God intends me to be. I see what the Lord has done with my life over the past 10 years and I am grateful that I can see his hand that has worked a mighty change in my heart and continues to do so.

These thoughts reminds me of the hymn, "Count your many blessings, name them one by one." I better understand the power in the counsel of Elder Eyring in keeping record of how the Lord has blessed us. "Count your many blessings, name them one by one...and it will suprise you what the Lord has done."