
February 28, 2024
Episode #239
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David and Karen Mains discuss the way in which what we say can illustrate how we sometimes speak falsely and that God has given us Medicine for Mouth Disease: “The exciting truth is that medicine is available that heals all manner of mouth disease.”
Episode Transcript
David: The book is not just about lying. It’s about different aspects of our mouths that get us into trouble and are really unfortunate because they do damage to those around us and the whole culture. And this is where our culture is right now. And so, the exciting truth is that medicine is available that heals all manner of mouth disease. Now, that’s what you say in your book and what we’re going to be saying in the podcast.
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David: Karen, finish this sentence, okay? A miracle cure has been found for blank.
Karen: I want to say cancer.
David: It’s the first thing that comes to your mind, isn’t it?
Karen: Yeah.
David: Anyway, that’s not what we’re talking about, but this is a miracle cure and I picked that up from the title of your book, Medicine for Mouth Disease subtitle, A Miracle Cure for Troublesome Tongues.
Intro: Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.
David: What prompted you, Karen, to write a book on people’s troublesome tongues?
Karen: My troublesome tongue.
David: That’s being pretty open, huh?
Karen: Well, I think as you begin to mature in faith and in the work of the Holy Spirit in your life and reading Scripture, you begin to see there is a huge emphasis on the way we use our tongues. We can use it for good or we can use it for evil. So, I was having junk trouble. And I think most of us do as young adults.
David: I’m, in fact, asking you about it now because I’m working through some issues of my own tongue.
Karen: It’s such an indicator, a diagnostic tool, let’s say that of the condition of our soul. And so, then I began to do a scriptural study on the use of the tongue, and it is all through old and New Testament, the way we use our tongues. So, I battled with that in my own personal journey and underwent a lot of correction by the Holy Spirit and confession and then began to see victory over the way I was using my tongue. and a much better understanding of why I would use it in ways that were harmful. And that’s sort of a psychological spiritual journey that we each have to go through. And that was such a powerful tool for me. I mean, I just went through all of Proverbs and wrote out in my prayer journal every single verse that had to do with the use of the tongue. And there were many, I mean many. That was such a powerful curative in my adult maturing that I thought I needed to write a book about that journey.
David: And you wrote the book here. And what year? Do you remember?
Karen: I think the first edition, there have been a couple of editions. It came out with the title, “You Are What You Say.” And then we changed it and gave it another cover and another title. And the title we ended up with was “Medicine for Mouth Disease, A Miracle Cure for Troublesome Tongues.” And I really feel, not that I’m perfect in this area, but I’m a lesson client at 81. Eight decades of life to use my tongue in a way that’s troublesome or gossipy or disheartening or lying. I mean, we often tell half-truths with our tongue. So, it’s a big journey for all of us.
David: When you say that, you’re thinking about our listenership. But when you say for all of us as a nation…
Karen: Oh, goodness. Yes.
David: The tongue has become a huge problem.
Karen: Yeah. Well, I think we’re seeing it. For those of us who have lived decades, there’s always been contrarians. But I’m looking at the political system that we’re watching now as symptomatic of mouth disease. In the past, we used to hear “my worthy opponent.” You showed respect through your tongue. And there was often an agreement to disagree. It was all right to be at variance in your opinions and the way you looked at the world. I mean, there was a whole range. Now, it wasn’t perfect by any means, of course, but much more common in our political language, just to take an example of it than what you and I are seeing in our eighth decade of living as far as where the political language is in our culture today. And that’s just a symptom of this problem nationally.
David: It’s much more calling people liars or whatever.
Karen: Yeah. Or telling lies about them. Telling things you know are untrue about your opponent. So, I mean, it’s really sad.
David: Well, I remember as a kid, I used to joke about lawyers.
Karen: Yeah.
David: And now it’s politicians, but it’s also invaded the whole of the culture of America that lies are a big part of what goes on. They don’t call it lying. They call it spinning. You spin it to give the best possible rendition as far as your side is concerned. And it’s really untruth. It’s unfortunate.
Karen: I went to college for a year and a half, and we had been married, and then we started to have our family. But I’ve always been a learner, and someone said to me, you’re the type of person colleges want to turn out. I’m always researching.
David: Compliment, yes.
Karen: It was a compliment. And I particularly, because you feel like you haven’t done your four years in grad school. But one of the things that I did get training on was journalism. And journalists are supposed to seek the truth and report the truth and report different sides of what’s being discussed. The journalists didn’t have to agree with what was going on, but that was their search, was to hit a medium ground between what was being said and maybe what the truth really was and then express it in the writing. So, for me, that is a very important disposition. And then when I began to realize that I had mouth disease, one of the symptoms of this is when you come home from a gathering and you’re just thinking, “Lord, I can’t believe I said what I said. Or I dominated for 20 minutes going on and on and on. No one else got a chance to speak.” These sorts of personal awarenesses that begin to come, and you think, “I certainly can do better than this.” And that’s when I went to scripture because I realized I had tongue trouble or what I’m calling mouth disease. And the scriptures were just overwhelming, overwhelming.
David: Convicting.
Karen: Convicting.
David: And instructing.
Karen: Instructive and insistent. Let me go to Proverbs 8:13. He told me, “The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil. Pride and arrogance in the way of evil and perverted speech I hate.” Pretty strong.
Here is another one, Proverbs 6:16-19, “There are six things the Lord hates, seven which are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breeds out lies and a man who sows discord among brothers.” Wow!
David: A lying tongue. That’s what you were writing the book about.
Karen: Yeah.
Karen: “Medicine for Mouth Disease.”
Karen: Medicine for Mouth Disease.
David: And the subtitle, that great subtitle, “A Miracle Cure for Troublesome Tongues.” I would say, Karen, that all of us struggle with the tongue in one way or another. It’s just a common problem and if you don’t check it, it goes out of control after a period of time.
Karen: It takes all, it wants to control you. It does want to control you. So, a lying tongue or a deceitful tongue or a nasty tongue is symptomatic of our soul’s condition. So, we need to pay attention to it because it’s telling us that something is not right within.
David: We’re seeing it in the political scene quite a bit now. It used to be you pick up nicknames like honest Abe.
Karen: Yes, right.
David: That’s not where things are as far as the political…
Karen: George Washington.
David: I cannot tell a lie.
Karen: And these were things that were taught as children were statesman and dispositions that we needed to have in our own lives.
David: We don’t have those same kind of outstanding individuals today. Although there are, I look back and I think of the presidents I’ve lived under. Jimmy Carter was a person of integrity.
Karen: A man who was till recently still teaching Sunday school every Sunday in Plains, Georgia. I admired the Carter’s so much. Both Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalind were extraordinary examples of taking the gospel as they understood it into all the areas of their lives. He was not a nuclear physicist as such, but in that field. And so, he had a brilliant mind. And you just don’t do that kind of work and get your degrees in that field without being brilliant. But their application of spiritual meaning to the way they conducted politics, and I think the understanding that everyone is different was an example to the entire nation.
David: The whole matter of telling the truth, it’s almost joked about in terms of the political world today. I want to say from my own perspective. I have only known two people in all of my ministry. Ministers and I share dealing with Christian people with a sensitive conscience.
Karen: Well, our people are hungry for faith.
David: But during all these years of ministry, I can think back on two people, and it wasn’t nice to be around them. I tended to try to avoid them in some way because I couldn’t trust what they said. And I think it’s a very sad thing when you come to individuals like this, and they are not attractive. Somewhere within the country we are to the place where you wonder sometimes whether someone is telling the truth. I’m not taking sides one way or the other. I’m just saying, you have to say, now is that really true? Or is that person a liar?
Karen: I remember one of those gentlemen that came into our lives. He was what would be diagnosed as a pathological liar.
David: That’s a person. I don’t even know what that means except to me when I hear that I hear, he actually does know when he’s lying, or he is using it to his advantage.
Karen: Almost everything this gentleman said to you was construed out of his imagination. Now we can look at those people and discard them. I mean it was enormous lies and then you begin to sense that he wasn’t telling the truth. As I understand, pathological liar, and I’m no psychologist, they tell lies, and they think that they are true. They have become true to them.
David: They actually believe their own lies, yeah.
Karen: Right. So that was the first time we’d ever been exposed to that sort of thing. I have a story out of my past about a lie I told.
David: You’re going to go to the book?
Karen: Yeah.
David: Good. This is Karen writing about her own lying, okay?
Karen: So, the book is “Medicine for Mouth Disease, a Miracle Cure for Troublesome Tongues” and this is now up on Amazon.com so people can order it. My mother had told me I was not to play with mercurochrome. That was something you put on wounds or scratches.
David: This was a long time ago. I remember.
Karen: It was kind of pinky orange or something and you had a little glass tube that went from the lid, and you could just take some out. But anyway, I wasn’t supposed to play with it.
Despite this prohibition on one of the days when we were caring for my apple cheek two-year-old cousin, Barbara, I spilled the mercurochrome while liberally dousing Barbara’s imaginary wounds.
David: I can picture it. Okay, go ahead.
Karen: Horrified. I watched the orange and pink liquid eat into the top of the new sewing machine cabinet. I hid quickly the sticky evidence underneath a linen dresser cloth with the disintegrating varnish immediately adhering to the fabric.
David: So, I would have gone from bad to worse.
Karen: Mother discovered the empty mercurochrome bottle before she discovered the fabric bonded to her sewing machine cabinet. “What happened to this?” She asked, accusation rising in her tone. “Oh,” I replied disingenuously. “Barbara drank it.”
David: Oh, goodness sake.
Karen: Barbara had gone home and wasn’t around to defend herself and since no word had come of her early demise, mother made light of the issue. And I feel inclined to say that my mother was a very intelligent woman, but a poet. Somehow logical connections didn’t come as rapidly for her as they did for my father. He always knew when I was lying.
David: I think I can agree with that.
Karen: At any rate, I don’t remember being punished for disobeying or for lying. The incident was probably forgotten. My parents were busy, but the great white blister at the top of the sewing machine cabinet stirred my tender conscience and I ruefully remembered my fall from innocence each time I looked at it. It was a great reminder for a little child.
I have another lie I told. Do we have time for another?
David: Oh, boy, yes. Karen’s reading now.
Karen: I read it from my book.
Being for a long time, an only child, used to exclusive attention. I’m six years older than my sister. I lied when my cousin Jerry caused a major hullabaloo by being bitten by a dog in Des Moines, Iowa, the Burton Clans. That was their city residence. My parents and I were on a stopover from Chicago to meet my grandparents and then to continue on a camping trip with them to California.
We’d never done anything like that before.
In Denver, I told my mother I had been bitten too, hoping I supposed for the same intent of hullabaloo than my cousin ever received. She believed me. Dad and my grandparents continued their trip as mother, and I waited for word from the Iowa State Police as to the rabid condition of the dog.
David: You can’t get by with anything, can you?
Karen: I lied also when I told my fourth-grade class that my grandfather had bought me a horse. And I lied again when close classmates pinned me about why I never before had mentioned such a fabulous prize. And I lied again when I informed them later finding my spontaneous fabrication increasingly difficult to maintain. That the horse had died.
David: I’m going to stop you there. Everyone has stories like this here because it’s our nature. We’re not just truth tellers all the time. We have to learn to tell the truth. My older brother Doug, who was a wonderful surgeon in his adult life…
Karen: He was a wonderful man.
David: He was. But one time I did something naughty, and my mom discovered what I had done, and she asked me if I did. I said, “No, Doug did.” I thought that was fast thinking.
Anyway, Doug did enough bad things that I don’t think he remembered whether he did it or not. But when dad came home off the road, he was a traveling salesman, my mom would have a list. And some of the things were bad enough that dad was despancous. I’m sure that dad hated coming home and knowing that he had to spank the kids because they hadn’t had to deal with the arm of truth yet. Anyway, I remember Doug in the basement or dad did his spanking, not with a belt or whip or anything like that. But he used his hand and Doug came up and kind of crying and it just broke my heart. “Oh my God, he did that for me.”
But everybody learns through very painful experiences that lying is not to be done. It has a bad effect on everyone involved.
Karen: So, one of the things I did, Dave, to establish a curative was I went through the whole Old and New Testament and began to write down every verse that had to do with telling lies and how our mouths were supposed to speak truth. And so, I would recommend that for people. Even now, I mean, many of our listeners are more toward our ages in life and have probably added into a lot of these things. But I think some of these habits creep back into our lives, particularly in this culture where the truth just may have the value it used to have. And I would just go through the Old Testament and New Testament. I went through the entire book of Proverbs and just wrote out every single verse.
Proverbs are what they say, little Proverbs. And there were just a whole lot that dealt with the tongue in lies. So, that’s the cure for a troublesome tongue. The miracle cure is to apply scripture to our lives.
David: We’re just giving an introduction. In fact, I’ve tried to write a sentence as to where we are going, and I’ll probably use the same sentence for a number of visits here.
Karen: You’re saying that we’re planning to carry this on another two or three more podcasts, right?
David: The book is not just about lying. It’s about different aspects of our mouths that get us into trouble and are really unfortunate because they do damage to those around us and the whole culture. And this is where our culture is right now. And so, the exciting truth is that medicine is available that heals all manner of mouth disease. Now, that’s what you say in your book and what we’re going to be saying in the podcast.
Again, the exciting truth is that medicine is available, spiritual medicine, that heals all manner of mouth disease. And we’ll look at it, not as in a childish way, but we’ll look at it in an adult way and say, “What can we do to reverse what is going on in our country or in our towns or in our churches or in our homes because this has become a serious matter for Americans, okay?”
Karen: Yep. Sounds good.
David: Looking forward to it. Thank you for the book and thank you for your honesty, looking back. And I mean, you have to decide, am I going to make myself look silly here? And we laugh about it, but it’s not laughable if it continues on to adulthood, young adulthood.
Karen: It will control you. It will absolutely control you if you don’t take care of it.
David: Yeah, so we’ll be in this for a number of weeks together. Don’t tune out because of that.
Karen: Tune in.
David: Tune in because we’re attempting to be helpful and talk truthfully about our own experiences.
Outro: You’ve been listening to the Before We Go Podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all-lower-case letters. hosts@beforewego.show.
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