Do you ever have those moments where you say something and when you hear it come out of your mouth you realize it carries a lot more wisdom than you intended? I was in line at the grocery store the other day. The cashier was getting extremely flustered because she had messed something up on the register and the line was backing up. And backing up some more. And backing up some more. And she was visibly stressed out by it all. Eventually, it was my turn to check out, and without me saying anything she apologized for everything taking so long. I replied, wanting to be encouraging and not meaning to be dismissive, by saying “Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. None of this is life or death.”
And right when I said that, it really hit me. I think sometimes because of my job as a nurse I forget that most other people’s jobs really aren’t life or death issues. I think there are very few professions in the world where you can be driving home after work and truly wondering if you might’ve accidentally killed someone today. And I am fairly certain that every nurse, doctor, paramedic, EMT, and others in the medical field know exactly what I’m talking about. But most jobs aren’t like that. In reality, most things in life as a whole aren’t like that.
And that’s not to say that other large life decisions don’t matter, because they do. But if I look at the number of times I get stressed by something in a day, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that in the grand scheme of things it’s really just not a big deal. Has traffic backed up and it’s taking longer than I thought to get somewhere so I will be late? Possibly. But is it life altering? Generally not. We all have stressors in life. And some of them are bigger than others. Having bigger stressors doesn’t automatically make the smaller ones disappear, but I think sometimes a shift in perspective can help, and in some cases help a lot. As that saying not-always-accurately goes, “Don’t sweat the small stuff. And it’s all small stuff.” I don’t think it is all small stuff, but knowing when to not sweat the small stuff can be a valuable skill to develop.
But the more I thought I about this idea, I then thought about how sometimes things we don’t think about much actually can have far more significance than we realize. How many times do we make a light of something when in reality it is participating long-term to producing life or death for us? If I am stressing over something insignificant, is that now producing death in my body when otherwise it never needed to? What about complaining about unimportant or minimally frustrating things? Or even just complaining as a whole? I won’t pretend that I have mastered that one by any stretch of the imagination, but are there areas in life where we consistently align ourselves with death without realizing it because we have become so accustomed to doing it?
The Bible tells us quite plainly in Proverbs 18:21 that, “the power of life and death are in the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.” It mentions in Matthew 12:36 that we will be judged for every idle, careless, or useless word we have spoken. Now I’m not saying we need to be hyper legalistic or critical of every word that we or others say, as that is just creating its own special path toward religion and bondage. But I do think it becomes an opportunity to encourage us to check back in with the words that we say and the ideas that we communicate on a regular basis.
There is a rather obscure verse in the Old Testament, Isaiah 28:15, that talks about how the Israelites made agreements with death and covenants with the realm of the dead, and it really begs the question, how often do we through our word choices make agreements with death as well? I lay this concept out in significantly more depth in my book The Gospel of Life and Immortality. In that book I also go over some very common everyday examples of where we use our words to produce death. But I think this can actually be a very important subject for us to understand better. Often we produce death in our lives without even realizing it, and it is largely because we have gotten so used to it as a culture that few of us even think about the long-term effects of some of the simple statements and beliefs we hold. If this subject speaks to your heart at all, I highly encourage you to get a copy of that book. It is available in print, Kindle, and recently just became available on audiobook. Because so often the things that we think, say, and do in life really aren’t life or death issues. . . Until we look a little deeper and realize that maybe in fact they are.
