Richard looked forward to sleeping in on the first day of summer break.  But, now that Richard had turned 10 his overworked mother had other ideas.  This summer she planned for Richard to wake up early and water the flowers in her flower bed.  They lived in the hot, dry desert and she didn’t want him spending too much time in the hot sun.

Every morning Richard awoke at 6am to the sound of banging on his bedroom door and the voice of his mother commanding him to get out of bed immediately.  He grumpily rolled out of bed and made his way down the stairs in a haze.  He did enjoy the feel of the still cool pavement on his feet as he lazily sprinkled just enough water to make the dirt look wet before crawling in bed and going back to sleep.

Richards 15-year-old sister didn’t care how long he slept.  He usually got up about 11am and ate a bowl of cereal for lunch, watched some cartoons and played video games while his sister spent most of the day on her cell phone talking to friends.  Finally out of boredom and to get away from the endless chatter of his sister,  he would go out side and take the watering hose to the empty lot behind their house.  At the beginning of the summer a few weeds managed to push themselves up through the dry rock hard soil.  But, as Richard played with the watering hose in the empty lot the weed seeds sprouted and grew like the bean stalk Jack had planted many years before.

A month later when Richard’s mother opened her water bill she nearly fell over from shock.  Her water bill had never been so exorbitant.  She knew Richard only half heartedly watered the flowers in the morning, but he did water them enough so they were all still alive.  She looked out the window from where she sat at kitchen table with the bills.  She had never seen the vacant lot look so lush with vegetation.  She wished her flower bed looked as green and studded with colorful flowers.  Then a possibility dawned on her.  “RICHARD”, she called.  Richard soon learned the hard way that it was not a wise choice to use the water to irrigate the weeds in the vacant lot while just barely sprinkling the flowers in the flower bed.

Fast forward 20 years: A busy Richard occasionally reads a morning devotional and goes to church when his mother calls and begs him to go with her.  He spends most of his free time after work watching his big screen, HDTV, surfing the net on his 15″ Macbook Pro or wasting time with his friends.  He usually wakes at 7am to be able to arrive to work on time, but one morning he had a dream that served as a real wake up call.

He dreamt his mom was banging on the door and telling him it was time to get up and water the flowers.  As he took the hose to follow her orders he was saddened to see how pathetic and wilty the flowers looked, really just barely alive.  Then he heard a voice calling to him, “Feed me!” His eyes turned to the voice where he saw the back lot of his old house completely overgrown with weeds that were so huge they were choking out anything and everything in their way.  One of them seem to have formed a mouth and was yelling for Richard to come feed them all!  With a sudden jerk, Richard awoke and with relief realized it was just a dream.  But, as he lay in bed trying to make sense of the dream, he remembered what his mom had told him that fateful day about spending more time watering the flowers and to not spend time watering the weeds.  Then he was sure he heard a still small voice whispering to him, “This dream applies to your spiritual life.”  Suddenly it seemed so clear to him;  It doesn’t pay to spend just a few minutes in the morning quickly reading a devotional he probably wouldn’t remember and certainly wouldn’t apply to his life, while the rest of the day he spent “watering the weeds” that would do nothing but choke out the beautiful things God wanted to plant in his life.  That day after work, Richard stopped by the florist and bought two rose bushes.  One for him and one for his mother.

For one word a man is often deemed to be wise, and for one word he is often deemed to be foolish. We should indeed be careful what we say. — Confucius.

Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world. — Joseph Conrad, A personal record.

A very great part of the mischiefs that vex this world arises from words. — Edmund Burke.

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword. — Robert Burton, The anatomy of melancholy I.2.4.4

Men suppose their reason has command over their words; still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason. — Francis Bacon.

By words the mind is winged. — Aristophanes

Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.–Proverbs 16:24

I love the art form and craft of acting.  There is so much you can learn about real life from the world of theatre and today’s topic is no exception: The power of words. First, how powerful can a single word be?  Bernard Pivot, a master acting teacher, honed down the process of creating a character to seven questions.  Answer his seven questions and you can get a picture of the heart and soul of any character your portraying–or even yourself.  You might think that answering those questions would require writing essays or lengthy paragraphs at least.  However, two of those questions are answerable by using only one word;  What word or sound do you love?  What word or sound do you hate?  Your one word answer to those questions can tell a lot about you, that’s how telling and powerful words, honest words, can be.

Secondly, there is also power in how you say a word.  There is an acting exercise I use when teaching students how to deliver lines called, “Color Your Words.”  The idea is to look for words in the script that you can place emphasis on by using your voice to illustrate the physical properties of the word or the emotional context of the word.  For instance, if in your lines you have something like, “And it took so long to get to the front of the line!”  The word, “long” can be delivered by greatly extending and slowing your pronunciation of the word thereby giving a physical sensation of extended time to the audience, helping them feel the frustration we all have felt being stuck in a slow moving line.  Conversely, a quick and guttural delivery of the word, “hate” can take the emotion from a benign distaste to one of utter detest.

Finally, the importance of choosing the right word.  Seen any movies lately?  When you take the average budget for a Hollywood film and divide it by the average number of words in a Hollywood screenplay you get the average cost of each word in the script to being about $7000.00.  That means it costs $7000 for any person in the film to say one word.  With that kind of cost to enunciate each and every word in a screenplay is carefully chosen and scripted, nothing is wasted or left to chance.  Oh sure, they do allow actors to ad-lib some scenes, but only after they have shot the scripted scene and it’s safely in the can.

In the world of theatre  there is a lot of focus and importance in choosing words and how to say them. If so much time and energy is spent on that in something that isn’t real life, how much more careful should we be in doing the same thing in our actual day to day lives, where our words can literally have profound impact on ourselves and those around us? For instance, when was the last time you consciously chose to say something you know they love to hear to someone you love?  When did you last make an effort to choose just the right word or words and paid attention to how you said them?

As our good friend Joseph Conrad noted above, the right words can change the world, and they can also change a life.  Probably even more important they can change someone’s day or even radically change a relationship.  The possibilities are endless, your choice of vocabulary extensive.  Try it.  Everyday, take one opportunity to carefully and prayerfully choose the right word or words for someone and listen to yourself as you deliver them as you would gifts for a celebration.  You just might change a life, and that life might just be yours.