Recently I was thinking about what happens when someone opens their mouth for good.
Years ago in the summer after graduating from high school I was 17, in a difficult home situation, and with plans to attend a traditional Christian college with my best friend.
One day I “happened” to meet a guy I’d known and respected back in junior high. He was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a church my parents had left during that same time frame. I hadn’t seen him in years.
As I recall, we had a short but pivotal conversation I’ve never forgotten. As best as I can recall, and in what I can only describe as a Jedi moment (“You want to go home and rethink your life”), he unexpectedly asked me, “Where are you going to school?”
I told him.
He said, “You don’t want to go there.”
I said, “I don’t?”
He said, “You want to go to BYU.”
Pause.
I said, “Yes, yes I do.”
It was not mind control. What happened to me in the space of a few seconds of his question is hard to describe. As soon as he mentioned BYU something flickered then roared awake in my soul, like an automatic response that I now would liken to a crowd of 65,000 BYU fans at Cougar Stadium erupting in the wave.
That one moment, that one collegiate decision, changed the entire trajectory of my life. For good.
You never know when one of those open-your-mouth, life-shifting moments will occur. When you will hear them or be the one to say them.
When the moment comes, no matter the awkwardness or the hesitancy, I invite you to open your mouth. With love, with nothing but the desire to do good, and with every feeling of giving that person a gift of choice they may not otherwise have had.
When have you experienced a powerful open-your-mouth moment?
