Four Letter Words

Long ago in a far away land and what seems like another lifetime I had struggled and battled depression. Depression, as the TV commercial says, hurts everywhere and everyone whose life is touched by it. I’m not here to debate depression but to share a life lesson that came from my time of struggle. I’m here to talk about four letter words.

Without boring you with detail, I entered into group counseling for the depression. The counselor was an impressive woman of God, Sister Mary. If you have visions of sweet little novice nuns flying thru the air or skipping and singing on mountain tops, you are not accurately envisioning Sister Mary. Her well known and profoundly descriptive nickname around the counseling center was Sister Mary Chainsaw. She could chew you up and spit you out in tiny mangled pieces without blinking an eye. Not being Catholic, I had no previous experience or exposure to nuns; this came as a shock to me. I, too, had the visions of flying guitar playing nanny nuns. It just occurred to me that Sister Mary Chainsaw was, in and of herself, a form of shock therapy!

Sister Mary Chainsaw had what we now call Zero Tolerance for self pity or denial of facts. No one was exempt from her steely gaze under which your resolve to hide or try to redirect attention to someone else (and their issues) failed miserably. I found myself the focus of a Sister Mary Chainsaw smack-down more times than I care to count. And some of you think I’m blunt and to the point…I’ve got nothing on her!

What I took away from that season of my life was her disgust with the misuse of the word ‘should’. She said ‘should’ was no better than a foul four letter word because of the damage it could cause. People beaten down under the weight of all the ‘should’ other people load on their backs are carrying a burden of man, not God. Depression, consequently, is a man-made issue. That stuck with me.

There are many people out there that will gladly tell you what you should have done; armchair quarterbacks of your life. They can clearly see the error of your ways and present you with a laundry list of better options…in retrospect…after the fact…with 20/20 hindsight. They also frequently use words like ‘always’ and ‘never’. Not only can these words be inflammatory, they are most often inaccurate.

In conclusion let me simply say we should carefully choose the words we use and always be on guard so that we never lay our burden of weighty foul four letter words (regardless of the actual letter count) on others. See, the words should, always and never do not have to be foul four letter words….but too often they are used as tools to cripple, control and manipulate. We’ve all had people in our lives we might like to lock in a room with Sister Mary Chainsaw for a couple of rounds but my charge to us all today is that we diligently work to insure we are NOT guilty of being one of them in the life of someone else! A little Sister Mary Chainsaw goes a long way and still impacts my world today. What a blessing on my life she was! Wish I could tell her but I bet she already knows; Sister Mary knew everything!