We Become What We Are Told

We Become What We Are Told

Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works. Hebrews 10:24

I’m convinced we become what we are told. Tell a child he will never amount to anything, and watch him wither. Tell a child she can accomplish whatever she puts her mind to, and watch her try.

During one of my Kentucky trips, I stopped at a gift shop, where I discovered several cloth dolls designed by Wanda Chapman. I recognized the material from which their dresses were made—feed sacks! During the Depression, thrifty farmwives had made undergarments, nightgowns, and aprons from the muslin sacks, so some enterprising marketing genius came up with the idea to make the cloth sacks out of brightly colored material and charge a few extra cents. In our own farm days, my mother could make a dress for me from one sack.

Those memories came in a rush as I reached for the doll dressed in a white and purple feed sack covered by an old tea-towel apron embroidered with purple and blue flowers. Attached to the cloth hand was a wicker basket filled with little pieces of homemade lye soap. I read the accompanying handwritten card:

Cameron Leah Irvin is No. 122 in this series. When Daniel Boone cut a pass through the Cumberland Gap, Cammie’s grandfather Irvin was with him. She comes from a long line of proud, resourceful mountain women. She learned early to make soap from lye and hog fat, and quilts from any tiny bit of fabric left over from sewing.

She knows how to make beans and corn bread take the place of meat when there is no meat to be had.

She grew up hearing from her mama that mountain women are smart, loving, strong, and beautiful and so she became just that.

The rest of the card described the doll’s attire, but I concentrated on the sentence emphasizing how she became what she had been told she was. As I wiped tears from my eyes, the clerks mouthed to each other, “We just sold another doll.” And they had. “Cammie” now has a prominent place in my office to remind me of the power of words. —SANDRA

Lord, thank you for the kind words others have spoken into my life over the years. Help me to speak those same loving and strengthening words into the lives of others.

Wise sayings often fall on barren ground; but a kind word is never thrown away.

—SIR ARTHUR HELPS (1813–1875), ENGLISH WRITER