Healing Words

Rosetta Stone

Reçois favorablement les paroles de ma bouche Et les sentiments de mon coeur, O Éternel, mon rocher et mon libérateur!  Psaumes 19:14 Louis Segond (LSG)

May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.  Psalm 19:14  NIV

I am in the midst of trying to relearn another language.  It is a challenge to find the right words!  More importantly, it has been an intense and difficult time in our global village of finding the right words!   “Words” seem to have a power that we have never seen.   The power seems to come in that we can share the words to a wider audience at speeds we have never experienced. 

In our Western culture, the “first test” applied to the exchanged words is the “truth” test and in healthcare, we have come to believe that our first obligation to patients is to tell the “truth”.   Another obligation is to use words that are “healing”.    This standard does not deny “truth”, but it means our words and our hearts have another purpose that we need to consider and get right.  

In a recent email from a dear friend, I got a clear report about his care in the face of metastatic cancer.  The facts were clear, but more important was how he was cared for by providers whose hearts were as important as the reported facts.  

In what ever language or culture, we need to find those healing words and hearts.  Healing words have and will connect us and they are “good news” to a suffering world.  

Marvin

References

Here is a current example of other healing conversations:

http://www.onbeing.org/program/next-christians/4839/audio?embed=1