No more teacher's dirty looks

Last day of school for the Melchior’s. It is only a half day, but we are having the entire 6th grade over for a last-day-of-school pool party this afternoon, so it turns into a full day.

I always love it when my kids are home for the summer. Parents keep telling me that they don’t know what they’ll do and how they can’t wait for school to start again, but I always look forward to being with my kids. I really like them and their company.

Yesterday, I got a call from a mother upset about something one of my sons had done. It was a great opportunity for me to practice “receiving feedback” like we talked about in yesterday’s post. I tried to listen without being defensive (hard!) and really heard her concerns. I hung up and hunted my son down.

After Steve and I spoke with him (and his siblings who witnessed the event), we came to understand that it wasn’t as cut and dry as the other mother thought. These things never are, are they? Eventually, we dug down to the bottom of the issue to understand not just the incident, but what is actually happening relationally that invites problems.

Later, I was thinking about the inflammatory nature of language. Yesterday’s post was about receiving feedback, but the way we GIVE it is just as important. As much as I love words, and my whole life is about word choice right now as I work on the book, I still find myself using language in my everyday conversations that is not helpful.

Ephesians 4 says, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” And the other killer in Philippians 2, “Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe.”

I took a quick mental survey of everything I said yesterday. You know, kind of like when you’re keeping a food journal when on a diet and you write down even that one pretzel rod so that you can evaluate how much you are really eating. It is a shocking exercise to write down everything you say in a day. Did everything I said yesterday build someone up? Now you try.

I suspect this talk business is most difficult in crisis situations, when we are prone to show our true colors. LOVE is so much about action, but it is profoundly about words as well.