Be Sweet

It was the mantra of every southern mom, shouted to teenaged daughters on their way out the door. “Be sweet!” It meant so much more – “Remember who you are”, “I’m watching you”, “Don’t get in the car with someone you don’t know.”

And thus encouraged, I slammed the door and ran toward the waiting car with instructions to be the very thing I saw as the kiss of death. As adjectives went, “sweet” and “cute” lurked at the very bottom of my list of desirables. Yet those two words were the ones most often thrown at me and caught like Velcro on the sleeves of my baby blue mohair sweater.

Cute. I longed to bask in words like beautiful, desirable, sexy, foxy (it was the late sixties after all). I had no hope of achieving anything remotely like the patina of poise and polish that surrounded Cheryl Tiegs as she stared out at me from the pages of my Seventeen magazine.

But cute I could live with. Sweet was dull, boring. I had no hope of “dangerous”, no chance at “mysterious”. Why did I rebel against it so? It was the one word that my friends would have used to describe me. Yet it was a word reserved for last ditch efforts at promoting blind dates. It stank of mundane routine, no room for excitement or risk.

Risk looks a lot more promising on that side of twenty than this side of sixty. So now would “sweet” be the term that applies? I am more likely to be called headstrong, opinionated, eccentric (a personal favorite), or intense. Any of those are pleasing to me. I have become someone I rather like.

But I need sweet too. Because my faith is important to me and I want that to show. I looked it up. “Sweet” appears in the NIV twenty-five times and is used to describe water, fruit, drinks, evil, soil, fellowship, words, sleep, longing, honey, wisdom, light, a voice and a scroll. The word itself is not used to describe a righteous, faithful person.

So why have I reversed myself and taken that characteristic as a personal goal? Still a word we use to describe someone who is pleasant to be around, dear, and gracious – someone with whom I would want to spend time – it is more than that. Sweetness indicates a certain generosity of spirit, faithfulness as friend, and a compassion and concern.

Jesus said it in Matthew 19:19, “…love your neighbor as yourself.” Be sweet.