Try A Little Tenderness

The stories you are about to hear are true.  Names will be omitted to protect the innocent.

Incident #1: Sunday afternoon.  I'm at church, and I'm sitting in Sunday School.   It's an excellent lesson, partly about using our talents to push the work of God forward. Suddenly, I hear the teacher say my name, and I snap to full attention just in time to hear the teacher give me a lovely compliment about a talent she's perceived in me, one I'd never been aware of.  As a result, I feel like a million bucks the rest of the day.

Incident #2: Your birthday is always the best time to have a Facebook account, because, if you have awesome friends (like I do), a lot of them will take the time to write out a little birthday greeting to you.  I love all the greetings I received (and I thank my friends profusely for all of them), but one of them was different from the others.  In this greeting, a friend of mine, who happens to be an editor at a website I write for, takes the time to not only wish me a happy birthday, but also thanks me for being a good addition to the website team.  This makes me feel really good; it's a birthday gift in and of itself.  I come away feeling like a million bucks again.

Incident #3: I'm at work, and I've come off the high of an excellent weekend and I'm back to the day-by-day drudge of working at a warehouse.  The day is coming to a close, and I'm getting ready to go home when one of my co-workers, just out of the blue, says, "AJ, has anyone ever told you that you're a pretty cool guy?"  Stunned, I stammer out some stupid-sounding response, but I'm feeling like a million bucks again.

What do these three snapshots of my life have in common?  All of them feature someone who, with just a few words, changed my mood for the whole day.  It just took a few seconds to do, but it affected me for hours.

If your mom is anything like mine, you've probably heard this phrase hundreds of times: "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."  It's a cliche, yes, but it does have a lot of wisdom behind it.  What we say has such a big impact on what happens around us.  With one small insult, you can tear a huge hole out of somebody's self-worth.  It also works the other way, though; with one small compliment, you can build a person up and really feel great about themselves.

I don't want to get preachy, but I would just like to encourage all of us (including myself, because I can work on this, too) to be careful what we say around others.  All of us are in a position to have a big impact on the people we meet, and all it takes to leave a mark is a couple of words.  It behooves us to choose those words carefully.  Remember what your mom said!