Rocky Words

Did you ever say something, or write something, and then a little bit later feel that telltale oogy feeling slide into your belly? The uh-oh feeling? The pit?

Yesterday morning I posted my piece on The Fringe, and then a few hours later when it popped into my email in-box (yes, I subscribe to my own blog; don’t ask), I reread it.

And that’s when I felt it. Instant pit. It began with a low-level ache in my gut, but quickly yawned open to a pit the size of the Marianas Trench. You know, the trench that plummets like 57 miles beneath the floor of the Pacific (actually it’s seven miles, but you know what I mean).

I knew that I had stepped over the line; I’d been too critical; I’d stated something too harshly.

I’ve always been a verbal blurter. Now, it seems, I’ve expanded my horizons; I’m a blogger blurter, too.

When Brad got home from work yesterday afternoon I asked him to read the post. He had already read it. “Well,” I asked him. “What did you think?”

“Actually…I was a little surprised,” he answered.

Let me translate this Understatement Maneese for you: “I was appalled! I was horrified! What in the world were you thinking???!!!”

I totally freaked when I heard Brad tell me he was “surprised” by the post, and in the midst of my freaking, Brad asked me this: “Why did you write it then?”

This is a man who always gets straight to the point.

“I don’t know! I was running late…it was already 7:20…I slept late!” I blubbered. “Noah kept holding his new succulent bloom in my face, Rowan was sitting on my lap, hanging on my neck! I just pushed the publish button! I wasn’t even really thinking about what I wrote!”

I wasn’t even thinking.

Honestly, I would have been much better suited as a nineteenth-century writer. I think the process of dipping a quill into the inkwell and painstakingly dabbing ink onto paper would have slowed me down, given me more time to think, process, contemplate. Twenty-first century communications – all this frantic emailing, blogging, social networking, facebooking, twittering, tweeting, squawking – is just too much, too fast, too frenzied, too instantaneous.

I thought about this recently when my friend Brian, who lives in Japan, made an offhand remark on his facebook wall that prompted a flurry of responses, a few of them offensive. He ended up backpedaling, apologizing and sheepishly admitting that he’d meant no harm, and I remember thinking, “Ah. We must be more careful here. This is dangerous ground.”

Just this week I told my boss in a meeting that I was going to try to rely less on email correspondence with my colleagues, because I thought email bred miscommunication. There I was, waxing eloquent from my soapbox on the perils of modern communications, and the very next day, I blog blurted.

So I called my pastor and apologized. I stammered and stuttered and sweated and paced, and of course my pastor received and accepted my pathetic yammering with extraordinary grace. In fact, by the end of the conversation my pastor was comforting me – “Don’t worry…we still love you...it’s okay.” I felt a nanosecond of relief when I got off the phone, only to realize that somehow, in the span of that six-minute phone call, the focus had shifted from my pastor to me. “Great, that’s just great,” I thought to myself, still pacing my office at work. “How did that happen? How did we end up talking about my feelings, when I was the one calling to apologize?!”

Did you ever have a day in which you found yourself quite tiresome?

It was a hard day…and a hard lesson. One I’ve been taught before, but yet doesn’t seem to stick.

I will keep trying though. I will try to think before I speak and write. To slow down. To blurt less. I’ll ask God for help, too.

Perhaps I’ll write more about rocks. Rocks are pretty innocuous, and they seem to be providing creative fodder these days. At the very least I may tape a Proverb or Psalm to my forehead, or better yet to my keyboard. How about this one, which covers the gamut of rocks and words:

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer (Psalm 19:14).