Day 16: Consider the Source

When I was a little girl, I had the incredible good fortune to live in the same house with my grandma, Annie Dee.  Annie Dee was a funny old lady.  She had no teeth, except for the ones she kept in a jar by her bedside.  She lived back in the day when people didn't try to "save" their teeth, they just had them pulled and got dentures.  But she didn't like the way her dentures fit, so she just kept them in a jar beside her bed for special occasions. 

One of her favorite "special occasions" was putting those teeth in when we weren't expecting it, and scaring the b'geezus out of us by smiling all vampire-like and chasing us around the house!  Like I said, she was a funny old lady. ( She used to also wet her pants every time she laughed . . . and man is she mad at me from Heaven right now!)

But in addition to being incredibly funny, she was oh so very wise.  She had a lot of sayings that were really wasted on my youth, often totally over my head, or seemingly irrelevant.  But as I grew older, I began to understand just how wise her sayings were.  I'm sure none of them are even unique to her, but the fact that she said them, and the fact that they stuck with me all my life, make them "her sayings" in my mind.

A few of her favorites were

"Pretty is as pretty does."
"Good riddance to bad rubbish."
"A mouth full of that will make anyone sick."
"I guess we'll just have to wait and see what the Lord does with this one."

and my personal favorite

"Consider the source, Sister.  Consider the source."

Consider the source means just that.  Think about the person who is speaking over you.  Is it someone you trust?  Is it a friend?  An adversary?  A wise person?  A fool? A person with a good reputation or someone of ill repute?  How likely is this person to speak truth?

I find that whenever someone says something unkind about me, something without merit, it is easy to dismiss the words if I just "consider the source."

And yet, for some reason, when the enemy speaks over me, I find it fairly easy to let those words seep in. 

Far.  Too.  Deep.

All that to say,  the next time the enemy speaks over me, I will listen to my grandma and "Consider the source, Sister.  Consider the source."