It’s like a tickle in your throat in the dark when the tightness in the chest lingers and congestion is an uninvited overnight guest. You try to breathe slow and deep to coax it away, the way you hold so still when a bumblebee hovers over you at the picnic table. You wait for it to fly and leave you in peace. But the more you hold in the tickle, the more it builds. It has to get out. It has to be heard. You hack loud, a bruising kind of cough, a series of barks that wake the husband.

It’s like heartburn or fever in your bones. You glow hot with words when you stow them away them like a candle under a mattress. You cannot be silent; you are made to be a truth teller. It may make you unpopular. You may feel like you alone are left. Like Eugene Peterson says, you carry “a message that is comforting but never comfortable.”

We are little Isaiahs telling the saving grace of the Messiah. We are willing Ezekiels who swallow down hard words and then speak them out to forewarn. We are reluctant Jeremiahs who go to hard-nosed people and urge them to turn from their ways. There are hard hearts to be softened. There are lives that need changing. There is justice to be done.

We write because the word of the Lord has come and we cannot hold it in.

{As a peacemaker, I can sometimes be a reluctant truth teller waiting on the fire in my bones to force me to speak. How do you handle hard words that you feel the Lord has asked you to write and share?}

This is Day 6 of my series 31 Days ~ Preserve Your Story, linking up with The Nester’s annual 31 Days of Change.