This is a "Dum" Post

Earlier this week I wrote a blog post about cutting my finger while slicing a tomato.  While I did not receive any “Get Well Soon” cards, I did get an interesting request.  One of my readers (thanks mom!) mentioned this post to a friend of hers, and he sais that he had recently cut his tongue on a Dum Dum sucker.  As the conversation continued, they started to wonder if there could be a lesson learned from this kind of encounter just like I learned from my cut finger.

The first and most obvious life lesson here is as follows: inspect your candy before consumption.  I mean, you do this for your kids after Halloween, right?  You always check it for razor blades and such when you children are involved.  Have the same diligence in your own life.  It’s called a “Dum Dum” after all; make sure you are smarter than your candy.  Now I’ve never met this person, and I assume he is a relatively intelligent guy, despite his lack of foresight toward candy-related injuries, and so I will choose to believe that this lesson was learned by him almost instantly (or at least after the bleeding stopped).

Which is why the second life lesson is a little less obvious: in the same way that our tongues can be used to hurt others, they can also be hurt by others.  Have you ever chosen not to say something you knew was right because you had been hurt in the past for telling the truth?  Or maybe you’ve spoken life into someone else time after time only to be repeatedly disappointed.  We all know that the words we say can cut others, but sometimes we are the ones who get cut and so we protect our tongues by keeping silent.  This does not mean that we just say whatever we think all the time, but it does mean that we shouldn’t let the fact that we might get hurt keep us from saying the good, encouraging, life affirming, and sometimes challenging things we know we should say.