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I used to have this habit. It was a bad habit, but it felt like a gift. It felt like raw, unleashed, talent.
Sarcasm.
Biting, hard-hitting, cruel. I could dig down into peoples skin and come away with chunks of self-esteem like no one else. I was what- fourteen, fifteen years old- and yet I could use sarcasm like I’d been trained in it in the mountains of Peru for forty years.
(As far as I know, there is not a sarcasm training camp in the mountains of Peru, but at the age of fifteen I probably could have started one on my own.)


But, of course, it couldn’t last.
Not the talent- that has stayed with me. Still, like a flash of malevolent genius, retorts will come to me immediately. I just bite my tongue, now. Sometimes literally. Clenched jaw, pained smile, closed eyes, trying not to speak in the face of something so incredibly presumptuous, immature, blind, or uncalled for that it takes far more willpower than I possess to keep quiet.

Hey, Holy Spirit, thanks for being here tonight.
That’s the difference.
The difference between fifteen-year-old Sarah, cruel and brilliant with her words, and twenty-one-year-old Sarah, stumbling in the ways of learning to be kind, is only one thing: The Holy Spirit has been teaching me, for years, to control my speech.
It is not easy, and it is certainly not fun. I once reveled in the joy of the verbal fights I could start, and better yet, WIN. It was a delight. I was powerful, and I loved that. But see now…now it is BETTER. Not easier, or more fun- but better.
I have more joy, more peace, more love towards other people when I am not continually cutting them down with a God-given gift for putting words together well.

I am still good with words. I am just trying to choose, through the strength that only God and His Spirit can provide, to use them for good.
It sounds cheesy, I know- “using my powers for good,” and all that. I don’t mean to be cliche. I am very serious. If you are good at something, you are using it for good or bad. So choose. Because if you are not intentionally doing good, odds are you will find yourself unintentionally (or in my case, unfortunately, quite intentionally) doing harm.

Sometimes- often, really- I have to revert back to what a childhood friend’s mother told her daughter and I as she buckled us into the backseat of their car, after a day at the park. "If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything."
Silence is a great alternative to sarcasm, until I learn to speak with grace. 

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