The Nicaraguan people are a beautiful and grateful lot, and while I showered this morning I reflected on my engagement with them. What came to mind was what a fool I had been in my earlier adulthood, because I didn’t understand the profound power of words.

In my former life I used to speak to groups of several hundred people weekly. But I was careless and imprecise with what I said, perhaps because I didn’t believe anyone was really listening or paying attention. This week I was reminded of how much some people do pay attention and of the profound impact of your words.

I’d met some of this week’s conferees during my previous two visits to Nicaragua, so we share some familiarity. On multiple occasions during the week, my words from previous visits came back to me.

Emotional distress from life’s battles is apparently a big issue to Nicas; at least it was to some of the people who came to speak with me this week. My guess is that all humans—in the modern world, at least—carry emotional baggage that they may or may not be aware of.

One man came to me with a notebook in hand, and he turned to the page of notes he had taken when I was here on my last speaking engagement eight months ago. He told me of how as a young teen he’d gone to a Christian youth camp, and at nighttime after the organized activities some of his fellow campers had sneaked away to go drinking while he remained back at the camp praying.

In the midst of the night there came a knock at the door. It was the police. They wanted him to identify the corpse of one of his fellow teenaged campers. Somehow in the dark, on a night already clouded by alcohol, there had been a melee and in the confusion the police had shot and killed one of his fellow campers.

He told me of how the image had burned into his mind and how it had haunted him in adulthood. He’d had years of nightmare and terror which he attributed to the image of his dead peer seared into his conscious so many years ago. Then he began to read from his notes from the last time I’d spoken in Nicaragua. He told me all about how a particular concept I’d taught and a couple of phrases I’d said—which he had captured—released him from his terror, and of how he’d been freed from the haunting that had plagued his life.

Wow! Words are powerful.

A lady came with a similar story. She told me of how she had participated in our last conference and of how God’s promise in Jeremiah 29:11 had stuck with her. It says “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord. ‘Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans for hope and a future.’” She told me of how hearing those words had helped her to understand for the first time that God had a plan for her life, and that the plan was good and provided a future she could look forward to. She’d been given hope and wanted to say “thank you” for unlocking the door to her despair and helping her to see her value to God and the seeds of blessing that he had planted into her life which she could cultivate into a great harvest of abundant living.

Over and over people kept quoting phrases and concepts about abundant living.

Wow! Words are powerful.

I hate to think about the opportunities I likely missed as a younger man when I could have been giving life giving words to people desperate for hope, and how an undisciplined mind and a careless tongue might have squandered the chance to change the future for someone.

I’m always trying to learn, and I was already aware of the principle of the power of your words. But it was pressed into me in a more profound way this week as I heard the “you said” stories from my Nica friends. I’ve always heard those kinds of things from people who’ve heard me speak, but for whatever reason I have really never believed it or put much stock in it. I always assumed they were saying those things because they felt they were supposed to. But no more.

There’s something amazingly powerful about having people in tears standing before you, speaking in a tongue you can’t understand,  telling you of the emotional chains in which they’d lived, and how the word that God spoke to them through you released them from their mental prison.

Wow!

Now, I get it. Words are the key that unlocks the door that leads to abundant life!

I pledge to reign my tongue even more; to sharpen my words for surgical precision and to use them judiciously to break chains and free prisoners. There’s something magical about participating in setting captives free. It’s life in the Kingdom of God, and THAT is where the living is abundant!