Brother T. A. walked into my office with a dejected look on his face. He was ordinarily a man of ebullient personality, always ready with a hearty laugh. Today, his ebullience seemed to have shrunk, and his shoulders were stooped, as if from the heaviness of his heart.

He didn’t respond to my greetings. He just sank into the chair and began to sob.

“Pastor… I am so ashamed to be a Christian today. The brethren can be so wicked. Why? God, Why?”

He sobbed into his sleeve, and when he looked up, I saw his eyes and became alarmed. They were red and his face looked pitiful.

I was finally able to calm him down enough for him to tell me what the matter was.

It happened that two brothers, who were his friends, heard from a man who was brother T. A’s colleague at his place of work, that brother T. A. was having an affair with a lady in that place. That affair resulted in two pregnancies that were aborted.

These two brothers decided to inform other brethren “so they could pray for T. A.”  They surmised that since T. A. had fallen that deep into sin, it was pointless telling him about it. He would be recalcitrant. So the brethren discussed it behind his back and smiled when they met him.

That arrangement seemed fine until a “genuinely concerned” lady decided to tell Sister R, brother T. A’s wife. That lady, a self promoted ‘Christian Feminist’, stirred sister R up and gave her all the support she needed to deal with brother T. A, the betrayer.

One fine evening, brother T. A drove into his compound and walked into an empty flat. His wife had left with everything they both owned, and the children too. The “Christian feminist” was there to confront brother T. A. on behalf of her friend, and to rub it in. She shamed him and told him he got what he deserved as a shameless cheat.

Brother T. A didn’t didn’t understand anything about anything. After recovering from the initial shock, he began to make calls. He was only able to make any sense of the whole thing the following day.

When he got to his very busy pastor’s place, the man had his own complaint. He had called brother T. A repeatedly, but brother T. A ignored his calls. T. A. had assumed the pastor needed him to do something in the church, and he wasn’t going to waste his time on that. “Pastor had been disturbing me lately, and I decided not to pick his calls,” T. A told me.

Unknown to T. A, his wife had reported him to their pastor, and the man wanted him to come and explain what was going on. When T. A. didn’t show up, the pastor sent his wife to his office. T. A. saw the woman getting out of her car and sent a security guy to tell her that he had gone for an assignment and wouldn’t be back till weekend.

Now, he stood before the Pastor and painfully realized his folly.

As the events unfolded, he learnt why his wife left in such a hurry. But that wasn’t the most painful thing. T. A was a victim of the ‘scourge of the tongue.’ Yes, the big scandal took place in his place of work, but it was another guy who bore the same first name as T. A. that was the culprit. That one was even a single man, and the scandal didn’t seem to affect him that much. The brothers who heard about it thought it was brother T. A, and spread the rumor. By the time the spark became a conflagration, there were many ‘proofs’ to indict brother T. A.

Now, in my office, brother T. A sat down lamenting his membership of his church on account of his ‘wicked, tale bearer brethren.’ He couldn’t understand ‘how Christians could spread fake news about their brother.’ He was bitterly asking me, “Why?”

ELEMENT OF LIES…

I had the answer, but I wasn’t going to give it to him that day. As he was telling me the story, I had a flashback.

Just two weeks before then, brother T. A was sitting before me in that same chair destroying the reputation of a pastor I knew. T. A had heard from someone who heard from another person that the pastor was having an affair with the wife of a certain lawyer. I knew everyone involved and I was sure it was a lie. I didn’t even want to hear anything about it, but T. A insisted it was true.

“What proof do you have, to be this vehement about the matter?” I asked T. A.

He answered, “Pastor Deon, it must be true. I believe that behind every rumor, there is an element of truth.”

This is one of the most stupid statements that sounds like a truism I’ve heard again and again. Why couldn’t people realize the simple truth that men can create a story about someone with no iota of truth in it?

Brother T. A. loved to pray and listen to bible expositions. In fact, that was the reason he loved to visit me, even though he wasn’t a member of our church. But T.A was a gossip. It wasn’t the first time he would come to speak ill of other people without proof to me. I had tried again and again to deal with that negative propensity in him. On this particular day, I was fed up.

I got up and told him, “T. A, you have been speaking ill of someone who is doing his best to serve people, and you have no proof at all except your belief in the doctrine of the nonsensical “element of truth.” If you continue like this, you will reap what you are sowing, and be punished for a crime you never committed.”

T. A. laughed and told me, Pastor Deon, we need to speak the truth about the evil people are doing. If we don’t, how will they change?”

I told him to excuse me on that day as I had a lot to do.

That was just two weeks before his wife left him. In the interregnum, the rumor began about him, matured and got propagated until it reached his wife. Only five days after she heard, his wife planned her exit without giving him neither hint nor clue. In less than two weeks, a lie brought down his home.

While the rumor flew from mouth to mouth, and while people wondered at his supposed hypocrisy, remembering how active he’d been in church while living deep in adultery, T. A. knew nothing.

And his wife believed the lie. Why wouldn’t she when her husband always told her that “behind every rumor, there’s always an element of truth.”?

In life, the seed you sow outside can grow in your room, and the careless words you speak into another man’s home can break your own.

Those who are eager to believe evil about others should be ready to contend with the arrows of lies; what they send out is coming back for them. Isn’t it amazing that T.A could easily blame his talebearer brethren for what was a way of life with him?

If you were wise, you would share no evil, and speak no evil. Those who share evil about other people on social media, or spread stories about other people for which they have no proofs are only revealing the evil of their heart.

Those who have been lied about know how painful it can be, and many lives and homes have been damaged by lies.

“Without wood a fire goes out, and without gossip a quarrel dies down.”  Proverbs 26:20 (GW)

Avoid those who gossip, for “The words of a talebearer are as wounds, and they go down into the innermost parts of the belly.”  Proverbs 18:8 (MKJV)

“Understand this, my dear brothers: every person must be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger,”  James 1:19 (LEB)

NB.

Yes, T. A’s house was restored. His wife came back. I haven’t seen him for more than two years now, but the last time I saw him during a break at a conference, he didn’t speak about anybody. After exchanging pleasantries with me, he took out a book and opened it. Then he began to whistle, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.”

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