Open Session

[Darris McNeely] Have you ever considered that your life is an open session? What's an open session? Sometimes meetings are held where everything that's said becomes public record. A lot of meetings town hall meetings, city council meetings, school board meetings, are held in what they might call an open session. Notes are taken. Anyone or anything that is said becomes a part of the open public record. Now bodies like that will also meet in what is called an executive session or a closed session. And in those sessions what is said is kept private. It may be recorded for certain business purposes, but there is a code of honor and agreement that what is said in that room stays in that room. What is said in that meeting stays in that meeting.

But in thinking about the difference between an executive session or a closed session and an open session, sometimes you come to the conclusion that everything is an open session. And I have come to the conclusion that if we adopt that approach to our words, to the things we say, the comments we make, to the speeches we make, to the letters we write, the emails we send, the comments on social media, if we consider our lives as open session, the words that we speak are less likely to be a snare.

Proverbs 6:2 talks about our words becoming a snare to us. And that often happens because we say something in haste without thinking. We say something in anger. We say something to hurt someone. We express ourselves and we do it in a setting, to individuals, and in a place that flies away. Those words travel, and they come back to haunt us because they hurt. They create problems. They create division, any number of issues.

Scripture has a lot to say about words and our tongue and how we communicate. In the book of James it talks about the untamable tongue. It raises the question who can even tame the tongue? It's a lifelong project to be really frank. But if we come to a conclusion that we treat life and everything we say and do as an open session and we do that with our emails and we do that with our words, we do that on social media, we do that with our comments, perhaps we will go a long way towards spreading peace, spreading grace, and keeping division from happening.

Have you ever had such an event occur to you? Have you ever learned such a lesson? I'd be interested to hear from you if you have. Consider your life an open session.

That's BT Daily. Join us next time.