The Healing Words "I'm Sorry"

A few years ago a dear friend of mine gave me the book "The Hidden Messages in Water." I instantly fell in love with it! It is a book about this man's collection of photographs of water crystals after he exposes them to different words. The pictures are beautiful and his research is truly amazing. Not to mention inspirational. He spoke in his book of a study people at home have done and I was instantly compelled to try it with the children.

You take some jars exactly the same size and shape, fill them with the same amount of water even taken from the same vessel to ensure consistency. Then you place the same number of plain white rice into them and label them with the words to be spoke to them. The first time we tried it we only did three, one we only spoke kind words to, one we spoke only mean words to and the last one we completely ignored. The children were amazed to find after a week that the rice that was spoken mean words to had started to turn black and developed a film around it, the rice that only heard kind words looked almost perfect and the one that was ignored was in between the two. It is a wonderful lesson for children so that they can truly see the effects of what their words can do. We all almost found it sad that one is better off being ignored than spoken cruelly to.

So now I decided to try this again with the kids to "test" the effects of the words "I'm sorry." We of course always stress with our children the importance of trying to right our wrongs but what does the words really look like on one's soul? So here are our findings after about two weeks, sorry the pictures are kind of blurry but you can kind of make them out. Also keep in mind most of the study was conducted by scientists between the ages of 2 and 9 so some of the jars, as hard as we tried to be sure the right words were spoken to each one, could have gotten mixed up!

Here is the rice we only spoke kind words to... There was one that started to go bad but all the rest looked perfectly white still.

Here is the rice that heard mean words... Many of it was starting to turn dark and had a film around them.

This is the one that was ignored... It fared only slightly better than the one that was spoken mean words to.

And here is our jar that was first spoken mean words to and then heard those famous words "I'm Sorry" amazingly enough it almost looks better than the one spoken kind words to.
Now of course I do not feel that this is by any means an excuse to be cruel to people but I think it shows that hearing those words, even if they don't heal right away, for I am sure we have all been in a place where the words "I'm sorry" seem to be too little too late, are very healing to the soul over time and be as important to our language as I Love You!