Online Articles
Grape Jelly and Mud
Do me a favor, would you? I want to test a theory and I need your help. Here’s what I need you to do.
Wives: the next time your husband has an important meeting I want you to enter his closet the night before. While he sleeps, gather his favorite suit and tie (even the bow tie if he is one of those guys) and take them to the kitchen. Once there, lay them all out on the counter, grab a butter knife and a jar of grape jelly and cover the fabric in bright purple preserves. Finally, when he wakes demand that he wear them to his very important meeting.
Husbands: the next time it rains I want you to take the whitest dress your wife owns and plunge it into the mud. Let it sit there for hours. Go ahead and do it! After the dress is all muddy and destroyed, present it to your wife and demand that she wear it Sunday morning. Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.
Here is the theory I’m testing; I hypothesize that after these articles of clothing have been destroyed, your spouse won’t want to wear them. I hypothesize that wearing those clothes would be embarrassing and awful. I hypothesize that your spouse would consider you unreasonable, harsh, rude and ultimately unfair by demanding they wear these ruined garments. On second thought, maybe we don’t need to perform this experiment to know the answer.
We spend hours and hours ironing shirts, shining shoes and styling our hair so that when we leave our dwelling we look, as we like to say, “Presentable.” This is why testing my theory may do some damage to your marriage. Those ruined garments would make an awful impression upon people. It would make your spouse look bad. Sure the mud would get hard and scratchy on the skin and the stickiness of the suit would ruin your day, but the real problem with the ruined garments is that it makes you look bad.
Fortunately, you get to pick out your own clothes. Fortunately, you don’t have to wear the jelly suit or the mud dress. Fortunately, you get to decide how you present yourself. Or do you?
Maybe, in a physical sense, you always get to decide how you are clothed. Most everyone gets to decide the tie, the shirt, the shoes. But you do not always get to decide how you are presented to others.
When I gossip about you, you have lost the opportunity to present yourself. I have stolen it from you. I have taken it upon myself to present you to the world as I see fit. When I choose to gossip, I pick your clothes. I clothe you in stories of your struggle with rage. I adorn you in tales of your lust. I grab shoes covered in envy, jackets saturated in pride, watches that drip with materialism and shirts stained with sin and I force you to wear it. When we choose to gossip we take the worst part of a person, shine a light on it and beckon the world to observe. How wrong. It is no wonder the Holy Spirit tells us to cut it out (Ephesians 4:31)!
Yet, some stand back and pompously justify, “But everything I said is true,” as if the veracity of my statement makes my actions egregious, as if the truth of a statement makes perverted speech righteous. Gossip is the malicious dissemination of sensitive, sensational or slanderous information. Even if it is true, it can still be gossip. When we gossip we force our loved ones to wear the jelly suit and the mud dress. We paint our friends and family in the most horrific of lights and then force them to live with it. That’s why it is sin. The issue is more complex than simple true or false.
And what’s worse, gossip forces others to live with the knowledge of someone else’s sin. Imagine if a man walked into services with a suit literally covered in grape jelly. Kind of hard to look past that! Equally difficult is the task of looking past that juicy piece of gossip we just heard. When we become acquainted with someone’s deepest struggles it changes how we look at them. Whenever we see them we can’t take our eyes off their jelly suit or mud dress. The words of a gossip have a deep and profound impact (Proverbs 26:22).
So here is the take home; don’t be the gossip, the gossip goes to hell. And why don’t we decide to clothe others in the most favorable of lights? When you speak of others present them as best you can. Figuratively, enter their closet, find their best clothes, iron the shirts, bleach the whites, shine the shoes and adorn them beautifully when you speak of them (Ephesians 4:29). Deal?
