The Weight of Words

January 24, 2026

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.

Mother Teresa

About Mother Teresa

We met Mother Teresa on January 8th — the entry on doing small things with great love. Her biography is told there. She returns today with a word about the particular power of kindness expressed in speech. If January 8th was about action, January 24th is about the instrument of language — how much it can carry, how far it can travel, and how long its effects outlast the moment of speaking.

Historical Context

Mother Teresa spent decades speaking to people in their worst moments — the dying, the abandoned, the people whose entire world had contracted to a mat on a floor in Calcutta. She understood from the inside that a kind word in that moment was not a small thing. It was, sometimes, everything. It told a person who had been treated as invisible that they were seen. That they mattered. That someone noticed.
The word she uses is instructive: echoes. Not immediate effects. Echoes. The kind word you speak today may resurface in someone’s memory at three in the morning years from now, when they most need to hear it, when you are nowhere near them. You will never know it happened. That is not the point. The echo travels without you.

Scripture Cross-Links

Proverbs 15:4 — “A wholesome tongue is a tree of life.”
Ephesians 4:29 — “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.”
D&C 121:41 — “No power or influence can or ought to be maintained… only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned.”
Proverbs 25:11 — “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.”
Jacob 2:7 — “It grieveth me that I must use so much boldness of speech concerning you… whose feelings are exceedingly tender and chaste.” — The Book of Mormon is alert to the damage words can do to tender hearts. So must we be.

Thematic Reflection

We underestimate language. Not the language of great speeches or published books, but the small daily currency of ordinary speech — the greeting offered, the appreciation expressed, the word of encouragement slipped into a moment when someone needed it and did not know you could see that they did.
Conversely, we underestimate its damage. The cutting remark delivered with a smile. The silence that communicates contempt more precisely than any insult could. The criticism offered in public that could have been offered in private. We say of these things: I was just being honest. As if honesty and kindness were in opposition rather than companions.
Mother Teresa’s echo is the key. You cannot control where your words go after they leave you. You can only control the direction you send them.

Richard’s Personal Reflection

In medicine, the words that matter most are rarely the clinical ones. The diagnosis, the treatment plan, the medication instructions — these are important. But the words that patients carry with them, that they repeat to their families, that shape how they experience their illness and their care, are the simpler ones. “You did the right thing coming in.” “I’m going to take good care of you.” “You’ve handled this really well.”
I have said those words tens of thousands of times. Many of them I have forgotten the moment they left my mouth. Some of them, I have been told years later, patients still carry. One woman told me that something I said to her the day of her cancer diagnosis — I cannot remember what it was — helped her through the first terrible week. She had written it down and kept it.
The echo traveled without me. I am glad it did.

Grandfather’s Counsel

Be generous with your kind words. Not with flattery — empty praise does no one any good and people can feel its hollowness. But with the genuine, specific, noticing kind of kindness that says: I see you, and what I see is good.
Tell your parents that you love them. Tell your friends what they mean to you. Tell your spouse the specific things about them that you admire. Do not assume they know. Do not save these things for eulogies. Say them now, when the person can hear them, when the echo can begin while they are still alive to receive it.
Words cost very little to give and last a very long time. Be someone whose words people carry.
— Richard K. Olsen