Listen To What You’re Saying

Listen to What You’re Saying

I said, “It’s all over! I am doomed, for I am a sinful man. I have filthy lips, and I live among a people with filthy lips.”

Isaiah 6:5

“If you bugged yourself what would you hear?” It’s a question I’ve been asking myself, on and off, since I (Les) was about ten years old, as a result of what started on this date in 1973. That’s when the Senate Watergate Committee began its nationally televised hearings. I was too young to understand the national significance of what was taking place when it was revealed that the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, was bugged with sophisticated equipment that went on at the sound of a person’s voice. But I was old enough to know that secretly recording a conversation to play back later was intriguing.

The scandal became a national obsession. Every news broadcast and newspaper led with the story for days. Two people never came together on national talk shows or at the counters of coffee shops without discussing the tapes. All conversations, public and private, led to the West Wing of the White House.

Bugging became so pervasive that I had to give it a try in my own home. Halfway through a formal meal at the dining room table, a strange clicking came from the floral centerpiece. That’s when I pulled a microphone from the arrangement my mother had made, triumphantly reporting that I had bugged the entire table conversation between my parents and my two older brothers. They thought I was joking until I rewound the tape and began playing back what each of us had said.

My dad, a pastor, used it as a sermon illustration some days later in a message he titled “If You Bugged Yourself What Would You Hear?” It’s a good question even now, don’t you think? What would you learn about yourself and your relationship with each other if your conversations for the past twenty-four hours had been recorded and played back to you? Would you find that your words were soft or harsh? Would your words ameliorate stress for your partner or compound it? Would what you hear be clean or filthy?

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place, but . . . to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

—Dorothy Nevill