In the Closet: Keeping Secrets with God in a not-so-secret world
Essay 11: Bridling the Unbridled Tongue
Do you see a person wise in their own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for them.
Proverbs 26:12
Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny.
Cruelty is shameful–unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man’s damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellow, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke.
C.S. Lewis , Screwtape Letters
Around my fifth grade year, the school counselor came up with the concept of peer mediation. Perhaps this was backed up by empirical evidence or maybe she was just tired of dealing with all the minor tiffs that showed up in her office on an hourly basis. Fifth graders on the cusp of puberty can be cruel to one another. To solve the problem on a basic level, she gathered a group of the more emotionally mature–the kids that didn’t have a massive friend group (gee, thanks?), or maybe we who seemed indifferent when it came to arguing (now that I think about it, I cannot decipher why she picked who she picked), and she trained us to mediate between conflicted fifth graders.
This is how it went: I would follow the two parties into an empty room and set up two chairs to face one another. Then I, the obviously mature, lacking-in-friendships, neutral fifth grader, would set a third chair nearby so that I might sit and watch them rage at one another, knees practically touching.
But first, I would lay down the rules. “Everything said in this room is confidential. That means,” here I’d pause and take a deep breath, trying to remember the exact words I was trained to say, “everything said in this room behind closed doors stays in this room behind closed doors.” The conflicted parties would smirk and I would jot notes on my clipboard, pretending to play King Solomon to their immature problems. My job was to referee, keep it civil while they talked out their issues. I was trained to find their commonalities, swiftly point them out, record the session on paper, and return to class. To be sure, we took our sweet time. We had one very important thing in common: we were all three just happy to be missing the lesson going on down the hallway.
I am certain the minor arguments were never fully solved, but peer mediation probably served its menial purpose, since fifth graders were no longer pouring into the counselor’s office.
I always felt superior just for the big word I’d tucked in my pocket along with its memorized definition. Confidential. Anything said, done, heard in this room stays in this room.
If it seemed ambitiously virtuous for a fifth grader, it certainly was. Keeping secrets is nearly impossible for anyone with a lust for attention–which is to say, all of us.
Who doesn’t want a juicy tidbit to share at recess or the satisfaction of being the first person to break news to a bloodthirsty audience? And that was just fifth grade.
Imagine now, as an adult, the potential to harm, exploit, promote, and market. Confidentiality is nearly extinct in this present time, where the thoughts of man bubble up from the surface with little provocation.
Quick remarks slip out the front door of a person’s heart and are made public as soon as we hit the pavement of the internet. It is as second nature as putting on our pants in the morning–we proclaim our opinions, desires, waking moments, precious pictures to an audience. We declare our outrage, disappointment, judgment, hurt feelings. We wrap deep convictions with thick satire, conjure up a hundred videos and memes to express our funny-not-funny opinions. We’ve shoved our vulnerability so deep in the cracks it wouldn’t dare peek out its shameful head.
There is little wrestling with one’s conscience, little editing. We’re too cool to think before we speak.
Once on the way to volunteer in my kid’s classroom, I passed a bulletin board in the hallway of our elementary school. On it was pasted the phrase, “Take Captive Every Thought”. This, lifted from 2 Corinthians 10:5, was displayed in public school for children. It was surrounded by little smiling emojis with thought bubbles that said things like, I don’t have to act the way I feel, and I can be worried and still choose to be in control. The bulletin board was simply advocating mindfulness of the public school stock variety. An institution which walks on eggshells to the point of not wishing a Merry Christmas lest they appear prejudiced would not, I repeat not, slap up a Bible verse for the willy nilly fun of it.
Take captive every thought–quite revolutionary, isn’t it? And with a closer look, surrounded by a forceful whip of righteousness.
Though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
2 Corinthians 10:3-5
It is a picture of trapping our sin instinct, our soul struggles, and dragging them to Jesus, the King, the judge. We make them bow before the master. Mindfulness, shmindfulness–we force our own thoughts to fall on their faces before Him.
Sentimental jargon? Weeds. Snide, sideways criticism? Thorns. Pride? Pour on the gasoline; they burn up in a holy spirit blaze.
The practice of capturing our thoughts and making them submit to a higher power has several purposes.
First, it makes us aware of our natural tendencies, our abject poverty apart from a holy God. Paul said, “what a wretched man I am! Who will save me from this body of sin?” Without a doubt, it is the thoughts that stream in our minds which find us forever guilty, forever the responsible party.
Second, we are forced to admit our powerlessness to handle the sometimes raging, inappropriate nature of the thought.
Third, it acknowledges our dependence on a supernatural source. On our own we do not have the power to fight this battle.
And last, it prevents seeds of bitterness from falling and taking root in our hearts. Seals and Crofts weren’t wrong: Love takes no prisoners. Love shows no mercy.
Made aware of the awfulness. Forced to admit our powerlessness. Acknowledging our dependence. Cleans us from the inside out.
Our worst thoughts, our best thoughts–though ceaseless, they do not define us. It is simply the old nature–that flesh we mortified when we chose to live by the Spirit so we might not gratify it.
The thoughts, the creeping fountain bubbling up–it can be controlled, boundaried. We can be self-controlled, we can be love-controlled.
We can hope for that which was formerly hopeless. Isn’t that wonderful? It gave Paul hope. “Who can save me from this body of sin? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus!”
Holy spirit fire–this is the weapon that has the power to demolish the enemy.
It must be exercised with care and calculation. If we could personify the internal struggle between good and bad, cartoon character-style, I would imagine quite a tussle. The bad guys would wriggle and squirm to get out of their handcuffs–anything to escape before being handed over to the Judge.
It’s obvious, then, that the capturing of the thoughts themselves takes time, not to mention the process of holding them in court. Therefore, a thought that then comes forth from a heart with audible words forced through the mouth–ought it not be sifted a time or two for editing purposes?
Here we are, each human with two ears and one mouth, dependent on the Holy Spirit to come up with anything worth saying.
Proverbs 17:28 says,
Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent.
We used to sing hymns to remind us: angry words, oh let them never from my tongue unbridled slip.
It is a long haul to claim back such confidentiality, isn’t it? To strip away the modpodged surface and let our vulnerable, non-shiny selves rely on the Holy Spirit to lead us step by step in our words?
The verse that has been nailed to my wall the longest is Colossians 4:6:
Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.
I’ve stared at it for years, the painted salt shaker tipped over, spilling grains onto the words. It turns out I’ve been too focused on the salt.
It isn’t the salt shaker in my pocket that guides me and my conversation in a saltless world.
It’s actually Who holds the shaker, and He gets to decide when and how to apply it.
He doesn’t wage war as the world does–so I won’t, either.
