The problem of gossip!
Getting it off my chest!
Because of my father’s antipathy for gossip, I have always been aggressive at trying to keep my tongue from that one horrible habit that is a feminine stronghold. I have found it impossible to keep my tongue as though my entire womanhood is dependent on having to talk about somebody to somebody. I often talk in myself to myself and correct myself for talking about myself and others in such ways. It is impossible to keep my tongue from gossip.
I remember the very first woman that I heard gossip to God in prayer. She rehearsed for a half an hour in my hearing the real problems of everyone of our brethren and close friends and when she finished I surprisingly felt a weight off my chest. although I wasn’t sure if I should have said amen or “oh really” at the end of the prayer. i admired her ability to confess the sins of herself and others so proficiently before God , but i felt very tainted with the knowledge of everybody’s business. I loved that she cared so much about us to carry all of those burdens to the throne of grace, but it also made me very careful, what I shared with her.
2 things always haunt me, when I gossip. The thought of my sharing private information and the knowledge of how that information will be repeated in the telephone game that is friendship and motherhood and sisterhood. I hear them repeating and saying Jayne said… and my heart is smitten with grief and embarrassment.
A free feminine heart to bear these burdens to the Lord was stolen from me in an ultra self righteous attempt to “please my father?” in this area of my life. He is long dead, but I hear him repeating my stories to him about my friends to the friend, which meant that the gossip that he was weeding out of my mouth was just as a part of his dna as it was mine.
“There is forgiveness with God, that He may be feared.”
I believe that verse with all my heart and it is just as sinful to exalt one sin to the highest level, without as much care of the many other sins that we engage in as it is to gossip.
I want my friends and sisters to say to me, this is okay to share with anybody. or Share this with God and I will forgive you when you share this with your daughters, but nobody else, okay? I never can tell at this age, what story will come out in what context and how it will haunt me in my own conscience. Be careful how you raise your own children that you dont shackle them with a conscience that sees only one thing.
Carry your gossip to Jesus, both in confession and in reality. He is the best gossip buddy you could ever have. I am so grateful to the sisters in Christ who have taught me what to do with my besetting sin on that regard! I am learning not to carry suffering in silence but to go boldly to Jesus with my sins and the gossip that I would say about someone else.
I would give you that freedom as a gift. Gossip to Jesus and become a great prayer
