Set a guard over my mouth, LORD; keep watch over the door of my lips.
I tend to interrupt. I don't mean to do it rudely. I just always have struggled in this area. It has been brought to my attention a few times in my lifetime and was again today. It's never easy to hear things that hurt. But I also want to grow. The funny thing is that in my family that I grew up in there are a LOT of girls and we all like to talk and tell stories and often talk over each other and it's just normal for us. I'm not saying it's right, it's simply what we do. I'm not justifying. Simply saying that when you grow up with certain acceptable behaviors in your family it is not always as noticeable to you as to others.
Sanguine personalities also tend to have this negative attribute. Again, the part that hurt when it was quite bluntly brought to my attention by a frustrated individual today is that I don't mean to devalue someone else's opinion. I'm just talking. I talk. I talk a lot. I talk more than I should. Although, I strive VERY hard to not allow gossip to be a part of that "talk". I just like to talk to people. I can go up to a stranger and talk and talk and talk. I love working in the church office because I get to talk with lots of people.
Anyways, it was a humbling experience when I was approached about it because I was in no way meaning to be rude or interrupt. I was just talking about what they were talking about. This is hard because I want to justify my actions and say it's just my personality and that I don't mean anything by it. But I know that growing in the Lord does not allow for justification. Whether or not the other person was in the right or not in their approach is not the question, but rather how I respond to it.
I apologized and then sent a note of apology. Although I didn't feel it was a great offense, I didn't want any door of bitterness to be up between us.
Lord, help me take this reminder as one from You that I need to guard my mouth. It's not always just the words I say but WHEN I say them. You know this is an area that I work at but often slip up in. It is so important to me that my mouth is never an avenue for gossip that often I don't pay enough attention to other areas - like my tendency to interrupt.
