Jody, I can tell you prayed for me today. Or at least somebody did. You two are the only ones who I have even spoken to about this. I have another speech/language teacher that comes into my classroom and we co-teach writing. We were talking about idioms today. One of the examples that she used to the kids was the idiom “My dog is not in that fight.” She was telling them that if someone was having a conflict, we use this idiom to show that we don’t want to be a part of it. How coincidental is that? I think God led her to say that to speak to me. That is one idiom that I think we ALL need to use a little more.

Thank you both for your prayers and suggestions!

Sherry,

I agree with Jody’s suggestions, but I’d also say that a good tool is to simply cut the gossip off and say something like, “I don’t have a need for this information, so I’d rather not hear it because I don’t want to gossip.” If you say something like that a time or two, you can be certain that you’ll be out of the gossip loop (though maybe in as a topic!)

Like all sin, if we take a serious stand against gossip, the world won’t understand and will become angry and take offense. As the bible says in 1 John 3:13: “Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you.” As Jesus said to his disciples, “If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” If we are willing to live a godly life, we must be prepared to be hated by the world. In that sense, we probably can’t forsake the sin of gossip until we are prepared to offend our unbelieving friends.

Please don’t take this as condescension. I love gossip as much as the next person, but reading your post really challenged me to confront that sin much more seriously in my own life.