Culture wars (X) Speech full of Grace, seasoned with salt

Two verses this morning “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer ” (Colossians 4:6), and “Let everyone be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath” (James 1:19). I've not always done these things well, but hopefully I'm learning. We need these qualities if we are to engage in respectful informed dialogue, learning from each other and doing our homework when we don't know.  We need to listen because there are two sides to every coin! Consider two people coming together, one with  a homosexual friend who had tried unsuccessfully to get help though conversion therapy and had then committed suicide. The other's friend had had sex change surgery, had later regretted it,  and then also committed suicide.  What we don’t know, is if they would have committed suicide had they not tried to get help in their respective ways.  We don’t  know what we don’t know, but the default in tragic circumstances like these, is to blame whatever is at hand.

These things do happen.  But it's important to note not everybody has transgender regret  (October 25), and conversion therapy, and religious experience for unwanted same sex desires do have success stories.  But in these days of fake news, biased research, and confusion, it's really hard for an open person to know what's true,  and what's not.  It's hard to listen when emotions run high, and in too many conversations on both sides, what is spoken is dismissed outright  as propaganda.   It's important to acknowledge on both sides,  that a great deal, if not all of it,  is motivated by compassion. For me, it's about the unintended consequences of what,  from my point of view,  is misplaced and exploited compassion, that and the widespread suppression of the evidence of these things.  On the other side is the injustice, and yes hate and fear do exist, and again this is on both sides! But we will not arrive at the truth by taking at each other, and/or suppressing debate.   And what I am pleading for this morning, is for us all to step back,   take a deep breath and be open to respectful dialogue, full of grace, seasoned with salt, as we seek learn from each other,  and to answer one another in love.

I am not saying it's easy. But if we Christians are to demonstrate the reality of the Grace of God in our lives, we need to be the initiators of respectful,  informed conversation, as we  seek to speak the truth in love. We need to allow the conversations to reveal what we don't know, and to admit we don't know when we don't. Since most of us have had little practice at doing things this way, it's likely to need practice. We need to apologize when we have blown it. At the time of writing the first draft of this post, I had just had an intense and way  too reactive a conversation with my son, on these issues.  Our problem is that we're both cut from the same cloth, the apple did not fall far from the tree. What was good though,  is that we pushed though until we could end the conversation affirming our love for each other.  We both need to learn better listening skills.

Father, we have two ears and one mouth, help us to listen, to be humble and gracious in our speech, and willing to be shown and to admit it, when we are wrong or uninformed, in Jesus Name Amen