The Gap

James 1:26    Santiago 1:26
    “Si alguien se cree religioso pero no le pone freno a su lengua, se engaña a sí mismo, y su religión no sirve para nada.” NVI
    “If anyone among you thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this one’s religion is useless.” NKJV

    The majority of this passage stems from speaking. In verses 19 and 20 James informs us to be swift to listen, slow to speak, and slow to wrath, and in verse 21 commands us to put aside this wrath and filthiness and receive the implanted word. He then goes on to inform us how to receive that word--by doing it, not only hearing. Now again he returns to his point of concern--our tongues.
    He says that if we think we are religious, and yet do not bridle our tongues, we are not only deceiving ourselves but our religion is useless. He said earlier that we deceive ourselves when we hear the word but do not put it into practice. Right now, the word we are to hear is to be rulers of our tongues.
    I have never agreed with the cliché “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” In my experience this is very far from the truth. The damage caused by words is damaging to a person’s spirit, and is far more harmful than anything that can be done to the physical body. Not only that, but this kind of attack is far more frequent.
    Words are a dangerous and beautiful thing. A teacher of mine once told me of the difficulties of public speaking. He told us that unlike writing, when you speak aloud, your words are ephemeral. They are there for a moment and then they are gone. For that reason we were taught not only to use clear and concise language but to restate and repeat our main points several times so that we would not be misunderstood. I found this hard because I am more of a writer than of a speaker, and I thought for sure I would sound redundant to death--for on paper it was redundant to death. But after listening to my fellow classmates I found that the ones who had taken his advice and repeated themselves several times were the ones that actually made sense to me, while the others mostly did not.
    This is all a very long way of explaining how I learned about the gap. The gap is the space between my lips and your ears--or vice versa. We learned at Potter’s Field that this is present when talking to people of different cultures. Different life assumptions on either end make the gap bigger and more of your meaning is lost. But there was something else that I learned at Potter’s Field that wasn’t in the classroom. This gap--between my assumptions and your assumptions, my thoughts and your thoughts--is the very place the devil likes to slip in the most.
    It is amazing to me that one person can speak something simple to a friend in a joking way in his mind, while that friend is broken down by those same words, taking them as daggers to his heart.
    These gaps have been severely manipulated here in El Salvador. This is the area the devil has attacked us most so far. This is also where Matthew 18:15-17 comes in handy. The more gaps an initial message is passed through (gossip) the further from the truth the devil will bring the final message. That is why the Matthew 18 style of problem solving is so important, and gossip is so detrimental.
    All this is to say that I need to be very careful of my words and speak nothing rashly. I need to be very aware of the gap between my lips and my friend’s ears because the gap between my own mind and my own lips is unusually large. I need to be slow to speak, so that when I do speak, my message is clear and can reach the other side uncorrupted.