Words...

There's a book The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman which outlines 5 primary ways people express and receive love.

1. Words of affirmation
2. Acts of kindness
3. Quality time
4. Gifts
5. Physical touch

The idea is, that most people have a primary love language and that's the way they tend to feel and express love. So someone who's Love Language is Gifts, likes to get gifts, it makes them feel loved.  Similarly, since that's how they feel loved, they tend to give gifts as a way of showing love.

So, as part of my family goal, a few weeks ago, I had my oldest daughter take the quiz on their site for kids.  I was totally surprised by the results from it.  It turns out that Words of Affirmation is her love language.

Since she's taken the quiz, I've really been trying to watch what it is that I say to her (and to everyone really). Instead of showing her love, we were often doing just the opposite with what we were saying.  Don't get me wrong, we don't call names, do insults, etc, but we were yelling a lot, this was ending in a lot of tears.  I think I'm seeing an improvement.

In the end, I'd like her to feel like she can come to us with anything she has to say, without fear of us criticizing her, but I also want her to learn to express herself with words better than she has been.  So hopefully going forward, I'll be setting a better example and she'll learn.

As the Hawk Nelson song goes:

Words can build you up

Words can break you down

Start a fire in your heart or

Put it out

Are your words building people up? or breaking them down? Are they putting a fire in someone's heart? or putting it out?