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Tongue-tied

  • May 1, 2024
  • Posted by: Carolyn Mahal
  • Category: Devotions
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But Moses said to the Lord, “Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue.” Then the Lord said to him, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?  Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.” – Exodus 4:10-12

As the voice of Tigers baseball, Ernie was a fixture on the radio for decades. Ernie Harwell was a Hall of Fame broadcaster, a marvelous storyteller, and a humble man of faith. It once was said that you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can never please everybody all the time. While that sentiment may be true, it seems that some people become so beloved that they come close to achieving universal acceptance. Even now, more than a decade after his passing, Ernie is revered in the hearts of Tigers fans and most Michiganders.

However, beloved doesn’t equal perfect, and Ernie would have been the first to say he, like all of us, had flaws. In fact, there was one obstacle he faced that had it not been addressed, he likely would have never realized the successful career he had. Author Richard Bak wrote the following story about this challenge back in 2013 (Link below).

Like all play-by-play announcers, Ernie Harwell employed several pet phrases during his 55 years in the booth. Unlike many of the current crop of broadcasters, however, Ernie’s signature calls never seemed contrived. They evolved organically, none more so than his trademark call for a called strike: “He stood there like the house by the side of the road and watched that one go by.”

That particular phrase had extra meaning for Ernie. When he was a boy growing up in Georgia in the 1920s, he had a serious speech disorder. He stuttered and had a serious lisp that prevented him from pronouncing the letter S. Little Ernie was a lovable bundle of energy, and his impediment was the cause of some good-natured ribbing by family and friends. But his father was wise enough to realize that the world wouldn’t be nearly so forgiving when Ernie was an adult. “We need to get that boy some help,” he announced one night after hearing his five-year-old son stammer his way through a conversation at the dinner table.

“They didn’t have much money,” Ernie would say later of his parents, “but they spent what they had sending me to speech teachers to overcome that handicap.” One of Ernie’s phonetic exercises was to recite a poem written by Sam Walter Foss, a late 19th-century New Hampshire poet noted for his vigorous, common-man verse. The last lines of the poem are:

Let me live in a house by the side of the road,
Where the race of men go by –
The men who are good and the men who are bad,
As good and as bad as I.
I would not sit in the scorner’s seat,
Or hurl the cynic’s ban –
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.

That final stanza speaks to one of Ernie’s distinguishing core virtues: a magnanimous spirit toward all people, no matter how flawed. “I know a lot of you people who’ve heard me on the radio still think I’m tongue-tied,” he joked during his Hall-of-Fame induction speech. “But, through the grace of God, officially I’m not tongue-tied anymore.”

As Christians, we often find ourselves put into situations where we struggle to find the right words to say. We freeze when the topic is too difficult, or we don’t know the answer to the question, so we have nothing to share. Sometimes, our emotions about the situation or the person asking the question leads us astray and we provide an answer that is wrong, inappropriate, or does more harm than good. Whatever the circumstance, the outcome leaves us feeling inadequate and unhelpful.

What a blessing it is to know that we, like Ernie, have a solution for our tied tongues. God’s conversation with Moses from Exodus 4 shows us that when we rely upon God, our words will be impactful. Isaiah 55:10-11 confirms the power of the word of God when it says, “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” With this reassurance, we can speak with a confidence, knowing that God is speaking through us.

Just don’t stand there like the house by the side of the road, letting those kingdom moments go by.

Link to Richard Bak’s 2013 article:  Harwell overcame speech impediment to become the voice of the Tigers – Vintage Detroit Collection

 

Devotion by Richard Schumacher

Senior Director of Operations