It’s funny how the smallest things can impact our lives for years to come.
I’m reminded often of a quote from something that happened while I was at summer camp as a kid. A group of us were having a camp counselor write out the words for the song “On Top of Spaghetti”, (for what, I don’t know…it seems to me that it must have been in the vein of talent shows) and the counselor misspelled “bush”. As the infamous quote goes, they wrote, “It rolled in the garden, and under a boosh.” Boosh was quickly corrected with much laughter, but it’s something I still quote.
I haven’t seen this person in years. It’s been years. Maybe nearing ten. And I will, at random, describe something as being under a boosh.
This was a tiny, blink of a moment in a random week in the summer. And yet, it is probably one of the most vivid memories I can recall from the experience.
It’s a little scary to think that something we might say offhand, in passing, might be something that is quoted or remembered for years to come. Especially when it comes to kids. You might say the right thing nine times out of ten, but they will remember that 1/10 more vividly than any of the nine other times.
I’m not sure what we should do with this knowledge. We can’t just stop talking because we’re afraid of saying something wrong. But there is a level of awareness there too.
Words do matter. How we treat others, how we interact in the day-to-day, it matters. We can’t live in captivity to this, but we also need to understand the nature of it.
That’s what’s so beautiful about Christianity. As followers of Christ seek to become more Christ-like, our hearts change, and the overflow that comes out of us changes to. There’s hope. By focusing our minds not on earthly things, but on the things from above, we change what we think about, what we worry about. And this changes our actions and words too.
