The Weight of Words

   The other day when we were in the North Georgia mountains, we paid a visit to the White County Historical Society and their museum in the old courthouse in Cleveland, GA.

   I had read a passage in Matthew 5 that morning, and, as I sat in the old courtroom, I thought of these verses:

“And don’t say anything you don’t mean. This counsel is embedded deep in our traditions. You only make things worse when you lay down a smoke screen of pious talk, saying, ‘I’ll pray for you,’ and never doing it, or saying, ‘God be with you,’ and not meaning it. You don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. Just say ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ When you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong."

   How many times over the years had folks in that part of the state taken an oath "to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help me, God" as they gave testimony in some matter. How many truths, half-truths and downright lies were told in that place, while under that oath?

   Jesus talks about the words that we speak, how our talk should reflect the lifestyle that He wants us to live, how we are to be real, so real, in fact, that others can count on what we say.

   This old courthouse was built in 1859 and used up until 1964. A saying way back in those earlier times was that a "man's word was his bond". You could count on a "yes" being a yes and a "no" no, no frills needed.

   Would that my words would carry the right meaning with no need of an excess of piety.

   An aside: In the early 1960s, there was a trial held in that 2nd story courtroom, a big trial with a lot of spectators lining the walls around the benches. When the folks who worked on the first floor noticed that the floor above was beginning to sag, and after the judge got the people all down to the first floor and out of the building, it was decided that 100 years was long enough, and that the building had served the county well, so that a new one was needed and built.

   Sitting there in that old courtroom and on one of those wooden benches (they looked like pews), I had the feeling that the words spoken there were still hovering in the room. What if those seats could talk? What would they say? Of all the people who had given testimony in those trials, would some of them look back and be proud of what they had said while others would prefer to forget the words they had uttered?

   If furniture can absorb words, maybe the excess of spectators up there was not the only the only weight bending those floor joists.

   I think I will keep my mouth closed whenever possible.