Is Your Mouth On Auto–Pilot, Part 3

June, 2005

by: Beth Mack

When my mom is in California, we often have lunch with a friend of hers. More times then not, we leave a three hour lunch with me saying, “Do you realize in those entire three hours she didn’t ask you one question about what was going on in your life?” It often seems that no matter what topic we are discussing she has a way of bringing it back to being all about her. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is true of just her. I think it is too often true of many of us. Eph 4:29 says, “Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear.” When we think of unwholesome speech, we often think of cursing or telling dirty jokes. We might think of gossip or slander. I think there is a far more common form of unwholesome speech: Me-centered speech. Me-centered speech is just that; conversations that are all about me.

It’s selfish speech that is focused not on preferring others and building them up but on preferring myself. It’s proud speech that says me and what’s going on in my life is the most important part of this conversation.

Do you want to know if you practice me-centered speech? Keep track for the next week or so of the percentage of each conversation you had with someone that was all about you. Then examine your findings and see if there was a pattern. Were your conversations mostly about you? I try and ask myself when I leave a conversation, “How much of that conversation was about me?” Often the answer to that question leaves me feeling convicted.

Too often our mouths go on autopilot and we talk about what we’re most familiar with: ourselves. We need to learn to be purposeful in our conversations if we are not going to practice me-centered speech. One practical way to put off me-centered speech is to begin to learn how to ask questions of others.

My parents worked hard to try to teach me this at an early age. There were some people in my family who talked a lot and there were others who were more hesitant to share and were glad to let the others do the talking for them. (Guess which category I was in?) So, at dinner each night we had a “question of the day” we each had to answer. For example, what was the best thing that happened to you today? What was the worst thing that happened to you today? What do you wish you would have done differently? What did God teach you today? The point was to help those of us who talked too much learn how to listen and ask questions of others to help them share and to give those who were quieter an opportunity to talk. Sit down and make a list of questions you could ask someone to learn about them. Try and make them open ended questions. Open ended questions are questions that can’t be answered with a yes or a no. They can be simple questions like: How was your week? What was the best thing that happened this week? Can you share your testimony with me? How did you meet your husband? What was it like when you were first married?

They can also be deeper questions like: What are some things you have learned as you have walked with Christ? Is there anything you know now you wished you had known 20 years ago? What would you do differently? Where would you like to be five years from now?

I pray that we would become people who aren’t competing to talk about ourselves in a conversation but people who are purposeful in our conversations and practice other-centered speech.