I’d like to tell you all a little story tonight. That it’s true and is my story is irrelevant. Engaging in gossip is one of the worst sins, in my opinion, because it breaks the trust of friendship, and it comes from the darkest parts of our hearts.

So, let us tell a little story about a young girl. This girl was a little naive about the ways of the world. She loved nature and spent all her free time exploring the ravines, the brambles, the trees, and the forests. Always on the move, she was forever fascinated by life. Always frustrating to her mother because she constantly dragged home wee animals who needed care and tending. She preferred pretty dresses that spun just-so, but packed a pretty fierce right hand punch for anyone who made fun of her… mostly because she would be usually stymied for verbal words on how to respond.

God had blessed her with long pretty blonde locks and big blue eyes; but with every blessing comes some balance – and she simply didn’t understand there was anything about her that was different from anyone else.

Friends came and they went; her two closest friends did not attend public school due to medical complications, and so school was often a bit of a mystery to her. Why does this teacher dislike me? Why does that boy laugh at me? Why does not want to play tether-ball at recess?

Her mother, gifted in the ways of fabrics and clothes, sewed her beautiful things to wear to school that spun just right and felt perfectly weighted. But, she didn’t quite navigate the world of her friends tremendously well.. and eventually grew to begging for clothing that itched and bound and felt uncomfortable, but no one made fun of her for what she wore day by day.

She learned to make friends with everyone new. And one day, a new girl moved in up and over the tall hill near her home. With her mother’s approval, she would pack her bag and march up and over the hill, past the two mean boys’ homes, into the house of the new friend. This friend’s mom had magnets all over the fridge, and the house and different smells. It was always loud there and boisterous, but everyone seemed kind. She and her new friend travelled every day to school together, and she came to believe they were good friends. She trusted her friend, and shared all her favourite things about school; shared all the things she was afraid of (like the boys who would kick bees’ nests in front of her while she walked to school); shared about her love of pets and animals; and showed her new friend all her secret little hiding places where she would go to explore and visit with the animals in the neighbourhood.

One day, a new person came to town. A boy from a nearby school. He quickly made friends with her friends, and she believed all was well.

Until she learned the boy was saying untrue things about her. She would walk into a favourite game, or visit the school library, the boy would be there with his hand over his mouth, laughing quietly while looking sideways at another person, who was also laughing.

Eventually the stories and the laughter and the meanness became so bad, children called her names while she walked to and from school. She learned to hide. She walked home the long ways by going backwards and then sneaking through the wooded trails young girls were forbidden from entering. She learned the hard lesson of being unwanted and unwelcome by all. She became an outcast because of one newcomer who made himself the popular kid by causing harm to a girl who caused harm to no one and loved everyone.

There is no happy ending here. The girl grew up, and the scars of her youth affected her later years and her ability to trust others. These types of gossipy, bullying individuals, when selecting someone already slightly odd to pick on exacerbate the mental health challenges that come later in life, the choices for partners and friend a person will choose. The point of this story is the toxicity of the behaviour and the lack of adults willing to question or step in or even realize when things have reached a tipping point that a young, vulnerable person is now engaging in risky behaviour such as travelling unsafe routes home because they feel safer than somehow meeting the bullies on the traditional pathway.

Gossip and bullying and lying has no age limit. Gossip is one of the most insidious evils, because it provides the gossiper a dopamine rush of being ‘in the know’ – they feel they have something to share and the resulting harms that come from the spiralling narratives feeds that dopamine rush, even when it’s a negative. I often wonder if Gossips are just incredibly lonely people seeking to make themselves relevant in other people’s worlds. I cannot know, but I have been too often in the circle of fallout that comes from someone who shares inappropriate information or tries to stir up the sediment and create a foamy mess, with themselves somehow at the centre, the knower of all (whether they actually know anything of truth is irrelevant, what is relevant is how others perceive them).

Gossip is a wicked, painful thing, the seeds of which stem only from the evil one. There are very few ways to bring it to a conclusion without someone being hurt, a friendship being ended, distrust being sowed. In my experience, once a vicious cycle begins to spin up, the only answer is to quietly address the individual in the eye of the storm, and then step back and try to remove myself as far as possible from any conversation – even if the conversations are about or include me – to simply step away.

How about you? Are you ever tempted? To share onwards information you know only because someone else shared or you observed something that you may or may not understand but cannot resist the delicious deleterious high you might get from whispering it onwards to the next person in line?

I think the solution can only be to take Jesus’ teachings to heart. Put yourself in their shoes, what would it feel like if it were you? If painful, then don’t do it. Do not cast stones or aspersions upon others. Even those whom you feel somehow justified in judging, just. don’t. The individual you are judging is your sister or brother, and deserving of acceptance and love.

So. On Gossip.

Just don’t.