Consistent

 Water sustains life, but it can also drown you. Fire keeps you warm, but it can also burn you. What matters is the intent and purpose with which they are used. Nobody drowns in a glass of water or gets burned to a crisp by a flickering candle. Likewise, the tongue can be used to bless or to curse, but if it has chosen a course, it must stick to it, for it cannot curse with one breath and bless with the other.

James 3:8-12, “But no man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men who have been made in the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be so. Does a spring send forth fresh water and bitterness from the same opening? Can a fig tree, my brethren, bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Thus no spring yields both salt water and fresh.”

Back when I was still a kid and living with my parents in Southern California, there was a corner bodega that served 75% alcohol, and the rest was chips, candy, and various sponge cakes with mystery filling. On any given day, you’d find a handful of neighborhood kids and a few alchies in there, the kids digging through their pockets to see if they had enough for some Twinkies and chocodiles they could divide among themselves, and the alchies begging for hooch on credit promising they were good for it. One day, one of them even went so far as to say he left his wallet in his other car, which got a good laugh from the Indian fellow running the joint.

Then, one spring, everything changed. The Indian gentleman decided to invest in his business and managed to cram a soft serve machine into the already crowded shop, and for the small, small price of twenty-five cents, you had your option of vanilla, chocolate, or the swirl. Granted, this was no custard or dairy-based ice cream. It tasted like sweet water with a bunch of coloring, and that was the vanilla. The chocolate didn’t taste like chocolate, but a quarter was a quarter, and when it got hot, the kids would be lining up.

All the kids in the neighborhood were some flavor of immigrant. There weren’t any real, authentic Americans except for the landlord, who would come around to collect the rent every month. Among the motley crew of kids left home alone because their parents were at work was Tran, a Vietnamese boy who had an analytical mind. He concluded that if he asked for vanilla on the bottom and pretended to change his mind halfway through, he’d get more ice cream overall because whoever was pulling the lever couldn’t stop the machine fast enough. I tried to explain they probably wouldn’t do it since that’s what the swirl was for, but he’d heard from somewhere that the customer was always right.

Shortly after the bodega opened, Tran put his plan into motion. He went in and innocently asked for vanilla, waited until the cone was over halfway full, and then said, “Oh, I think I want chocolate.” Without missing a beat, the man threw the cone with the vanilla in the trash, pulled a fresh cone from the box, and filled it with chocolate.

“Vanilla, chocolate, or swirl,” the man said, handing the cone to Tran. “No fourth option.”

When it comes to the tongue, the swirl is not an option. It either speaks life or death, hope or despair, healing or hurt. James calls out those out of whose mouths proceed both blessing and cursing, insisting that it ought not to be so.

What we strive for isn’t to tame the tongue with practiced silence or hacks like counting to five or taking three deep breaths before we say something but to transform our natures, thereby nullifying the tongue and the predisposition to use it as a poison whip.

Even the best-trained tiger is still a tiger. Perhaps he has been tamed temporarily, but his nature is still that of a carnivorous predator. If you doubt it, ask Siegfried & Roy. Any man who believes he’s tamed his tongue without a transformed nature is akin to the tiger that made a snack out of their handler’s face. You may think you have it under control and that it is yours to command and do your bidding until you find yourself halfway through a monologue that burned every bridge you’d ever built in two minutes flat.

What James is trying to explain echoes Jesus when He said you will know a tree by its fruit. A spring cannot send forth fresh water and bitterness from the same source. It must be either one or the other.

By the same token, no matter how much it may want to, a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. It may try to, it may desire to, it may attempt to mimic what the good tree bearing good fruit is doing, but unless it too becomes a good tree, it will never bear good fruit.

An individual can try to work on themselves, they can go to therapy, learn to love themselves, let go, meet their inner child, grow as a person, or whatever other buzz phrase is popular on a given day, but unless they are born again, that particular train is going to fly off the tracks and crash into whatever is standing in its way.

It’s the people who think they can make themselves bear good fruit when unregenerate that end up saying, I’ve been trying to be so good for so long, but then something happened, and it all got derailed. If you want to spring forth fresh water, you must change the source of where the water that flows through you comes from. There’s no way around this truth, though many have tried to find other avenues.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.