Speech Therapy Patients
For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. -James 3:7-8, ESV
“…he (James) does not say that no-one can tame the tongue, but no-one of men; so that when it is tamed we confess that this is brought about by the pity, the help, the grace of God.” -Augustine
“Just as one can depend on a fig tree to grow figs and on a fresh-water spring to pour forth fresh water, the maturing believer should increasingly converse constructively rather than destructively.” -Blomberg, Kamell
Therapy hurts. It almost always involves working on something that is a weakness. Then, through focused effort and the coaching of an expert, a person endeavors to grow in that area of weakness. And as anyone knows, strengthening a weakness is more-often than not unpleasant. This is true in physical therapy, occupational therapy, cardiac therapy and speech therapy. It is also true for spiritual speech therapy. As you are human, you’ve developed some speech deficits. (James 3:2) We all have them. The question is not if we have weakness in this area, it is rather a question of how serious we will be at focusing our effort under the expert coaching of the Holy Spirit, the Scriptures and fellow believers to strengthen our weakness. My suspicion is that we often do very little serious speech therapy and instead excuse our weakness or worse fool ourselves into thinking we’ve conquered the problem because we’ve ‘cleaned up our language’. James gives us no easy way out. He refuses (like a good therapist does) to allow us to hold onto our weakness with any such cheats. He insists instead that we must go to the only source of reform for our speech, God Himself. The Augustine quote above is so helpful to me and my fellow patients in speech therapy. Try to do this on your own and you will fail. The reality is that only as God changes a person deep down will their speech be changed. So, do the exercises assigned by the therapist. Let God identify the weakness He wishes to target and with His help put in the work so that you will strengthen that weakness. Then go on to the next one. It will hurt. It will be painful. It will require many repetitions but, the end result is worthwhile. Tremendous power lies in the tongue. Let’s pursue increasingly constructive speech!