You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip

by Kelsey McKinney

Shame is a big feeling for a child to hold, too large and unwieldy to carry. I didn’t want sin to be the reason I focused on God. I wanted to be perfect: no shame, no sin, no thorn. And so instead of feeling shame, I did what every person hell-bent on making a choice they feel is wrong does: I tried to find a way to rationalize it. But the Bible did not pull punches about how it felt about gossip. In Proverbs it read, “A perverse person stirs up conflict, and a gossip separates close friends.” In the Book of Romans (written by the apostle Paul) gossips are listed along with “God-haters, insolent, arrogant, and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents,” as the types of people filled with “every kind of wickedness.” I didn’t want to be that kind of person. And so over and over again, for years, I begged God to help me. Before bed, I prayed that He would make me unable to gossip, and then in the morning, I would go to school, hear something, and forget about my self-betterment