People know where we’ve been, and from our tracks they can usually figure out where we’re going. Beyond that, others know how we’ve made the passage. They’ve watched our steps, observed our behavior, and listened to the words that have passed our lips. Like it or not, we leave something behind.
What we say to others, what we say about others, what we say for others remains. Like television signals of old I Love Lucy and Gunsmoke episodes bouncing around the galaxy in perpetuity, what we say has an annoying habit of never going away entirely. People remember that we said something sharp and hurting. It colors for a very long time their perception of who we are, what we stand for, the make-up of our character. For them it is a picture-window into our soul, into what we believe and in what our hope is set.
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