A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford
You’d have thought the woman’s face was carved in granite, it was such a frozen mask of pain.  Her friend had suggested she come to see me, and the first words she said to me when we met were, “Oh, I wish you could help me take back those four words.”
And for the next thirty minutes that is essentially all she said. “Please help me take back those four words.”  It took a while for me to learn why.  “It was a Saturday morning,” she said.  “My husband was going to play golf with three of his friends.  And as he left, I said those four awful words to him.  They went to the golf course.  When they were on the first green, he had a heart attack and died.  And now I can never take back those four words I said to him.”
She and her husband were Christians, she said.  He had loved the Lord and had lived for God, so she knew he was in Heaven.  But she was tormented by those terrible four words, the last words he heard from the woman he loved on his last day on earth.
I never asked her what those four words were—it doesn’t matter.  The were obviously caustic and hurtful.
I told her I felt sure that her husband now in Heaven had forgiven her, as Ephesians 4:32 tells us, “even as God, for Christ’s sake has forgiven you.”  I encouraged her to take God’s forgiveness of her sin.  When we trust Jesus to be our Savior, the Bible assures us, He forgives all our sins.  There is no sin we can commit that is not covered by Christ’s death on the cross, except the sin of refusing His gift of forgiveness.  She could live in peace, knowing that sin of those four words was forgiven and forgotten, by God.But what an awesome reminder her grief was of the power of words!  James, the half-brother of the Lord Jesus, warns of this in his letter:

Look also at ships:
although they are so large and are driven by fierce winds,
they are turned by a very small rudder wherever the pilot desires.
Even so the tongue is a little member and boasts great things.
See how great a forest a little fire kindles!
And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity.
The tongue is so set among our members
that it defiles the whole body,
and sets on fire the course of nature;
And it is set on fire by hell.                         James 3:4-6

What a terrible reminder the poor woman’s story is of the power of the words we so casually speak to each other day by day.  The words we speak can be a searing flame of fire, or a precious and comforting encouragement to those who desperately need our kind words.
And so I earnestly pray, with King David,

Set a guard, O LORD, over my mouth;
Keep watch over the door of my lips.                  Psalm 141:3