The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.
Proverbs 18:21
Two Halves, One Harvest
Proverbs is a collection of short sayings, most of them from Solomon, and they work by packing a whole argument into a single line. This one packs in two.
The first half is the part people quote, that the tongue has the power of life and death, and Solomon isn't being poetic when he says it. He means that our words build a person up or take a person apart, and that the same mouth does both, sometimes in the same afternoon.
The second half is the one most people skip, and it's the one that puts you inside the proverb, because it says that those who love it will eat its fruit. The "it" there is the tongue, so the person who loves to talk, who reaches for words first and reaches for them often, is the one who ends up eating whatever those words grow. Solomon hands you the harvest and tells you it belongs to you.
Eleven verses earlier in this same chapter, Solomon calls the name of the Lord a strong tower that the righteous run into, which we discussed in A Place to Run. Chapter 18 keeps circling back to what words do, whose words we run to and whose words we hand out.
That's farming language and he chose it on purpose, because seed goes into the ground, time passes, and whatever comes up is whatever went in. Nobody plants weeds and harvests wheat, and nobody gets to decide what they planted after it has grown.
What Are You Planting?
The question was never whether you're planting, because you're planting today and all day, so the only question is: what are you planting?
The fruit shows up when your kid spills the same cup for the second time in ten minutes and you pick, right there, which sentence you're going to use. It shows up when a name comes up in the group chat and you already have the easy joke loaded and ready. It shows up when your spouse asks how your day went and you answer with a sigh instead of a sentence.
All that feels like reacting, not planting, but it goes into the ground just the same. Your kid lives with that sentence. The group remembers the joke, and so do you. Your spouse learns to stop asking and withdraw.
And the person doing the talking is the first one who has to live in the world that talking makes, because you hear your own words more often and more closely than anyone else ever hears them.
The same is true going the other direction, and that's the encouraging half of this. A wife who hears "I'm glad it's you" over breakfast is still carrying it around that evening, and a coworker who hears "that was good work, and I told our boss" stands differently in the next meeting. You plant that, and you get to eat that too.
You're already sowing today, so sow on purpose for one day. Pick one person, plant something in them you'd be glad to eat later, and leave the growing to God.
Prayer
Father, you gave us words, and you told us plainly what they're able to do. Help us to see our own speech the way you see it, as seed going into the ground and coming up later. Guard our mouths when we're tired and quick and sure of ourselves, and give us better words than the ones we reach for first. Help us to build people up today, especially the people who live with us and hear us the most. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.