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I have officially contracted Foot In Mouth disease. I hear it’s not fatal, just quite painful, and slightly embarrassing to go out in public.

This week a series of events that have been building for a while, and then a “last straw” sort of event collided with my tiredness and an area of personal weakness, and I stuck my size 11 foot right in my rather large mouth. And now I am feeling the relational and internal repercussions.

My words were not exactly what I wanted to say, and in my haste, were certainly not how I wanted to say them. And so I hurt some friends of mine, and my wife. (That’s still a weird one to me, because she was hurt indirectly by what I said… that took me by surprise.) I have asked the one friend I thought I offended (I thought she was the only one) for her forgiveness of my stupidity, so that we could not let this hinder our friendship (or our families’ friendship). I think we’re cleared up there, though as mentioned above, Foot In Mouth disease causes the afflicted to be slightly embarrassed in public for a while.

Well, last night, I discovered there were still effects from my wake left a few days ago now. More people were hurt than I thought. Argh.

I definitely recommend keeping your distance. This might be contagious.

And the tongue is a flame of fire. It is full of wickedness that can ruin your whole life. It can turn the entire course of your life into a blazing flame of destruction, for it is set on fire by hell itself.

I guess James contracted Foot In Mouth a time or two as well.

I hope to recover from this soon. The best thing to do, it seems, is to go back to the place I contracted the disease and display my foot firmly entrenched in my mouth, and ask forgiveness of my friends, who were the unfortunate recipients of the quite unpleasant results of my disease. I hope to do that next time we are together.

Until then, I will keep taking my medications, and deal with the public embarrassment, and keep my distance from anyone else who might become a casualty of my self-inflicted disease. Time will heal, but hopefully this bout with Foot In Mouth will help me see the symptoms long before I actually contract the disease next time.

That would be good.

So consider this a friendly reminder to avoid Foot In Mouth disease. It is not pleasant. For anyone.