You may have to read this twice. It is a conversation overheard in a beauty parlor not long ago.

"Margaret told me you told her the secret I told you not to tell her."

"She is the meanest thing; I told her not to tell you I told her."

"Well, whatever you do don't tell her I told you she told me."

The proverbial little Johnny was overheard repeating the Lord's Prayer one night. His version went something like this. "And forgive us our trashbaskets as we forgive those who trashbasket against us." Not a bad commentary on gossip, don't you think?

Charles Hadden Spurgeon, the great evangelist of the past century, said, "Tale- bearing emits a three-fold poison, for it injures the teller, the hearer and the person concerning whom the tale is told."

James wrote, "If we put bits into horses' mouths to make them obedient to us, we can control the direction of their whole body as well. Look at ships, too. See how large they are and how they are driven by rough winds, and see how their course is altered by a very small rudder, wherever the pressure of the steersman desires. So, too, the tongue is a little member of the body, but it makes arrogant claims for itself" (James 3:3,5).

We kid ourselves with cliches such as "Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me." Children know the lie of such a statement when they are called "fatty" or "skinny" or "dumbo". Words are the most powerful tool of man. The pen truly is mightier than the sword. The longest of swords and the most powerful of guns can reach only a finite distance. Even the ballistic missile stays its course and then is spent. Words have a way of going on forever. Once spoken they can neither be recalled nor cancelled out. Sound waves once set in motion, so we are told by the scientists, will travel on forever, waiting only for an instrument sensitive enough to pick them up and translate them once again into intelligible sound.

Words can make us laugh or cry, happy or angry, full of joy or cast into the depths of despair. The Jewish rabbis had this picture: Life and death are in the hands of the tongue. The hand kills only at close quarters; the tongue is called an arrow because it kills at a distance. An arrow kills at forty or fifty paces, but of the tongue it is said: "They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth. It ranges over the whole earth and reaches the heavens." (Psalm 73:9)