The Stop-Gossip Challenge Revealed

A week ago the I.W.O.Faith Crew was challenged to do their best to stop gossiping. They were asked to record the details about where they were, who they were with, why they were tempted, and what they did as a result of the temptation. Did they give in? Or did they use some particular stop-gossip tools to help resist the temptation? If they succeeded or failed in their attempts to stop-gossip, how did it make them feel? Let’s see how they did.

*Please feel free to comment below each Woman of Faith’s testimony if you can relate to that person’s struggles, would like to offer words of encouragement, or because you were inspired by their personal experiences.

Emma S. – Sundsvall, Sweden

I participated in this challenge because I think it's a really good thing for all of us, gossip needs to be stopped, or at least taken down more than a bit.
So my strongest experience of this was when me and a very close friend of mine were sitting down at school talking about pretty much everything, like we normally do. Then there is this other girl who we are/used to be pretty tight with, who is sort of fading out from the "group" so to speak, for no particular reason, it just happens you know. So this friend I was with started gossiping about this other girl, saying things like "she really buggs me, I can't stand it much longer and so on". So I kind of took a stand, saying she wasn't that much of a pain in the a**, that's she's actually pretty decent, keeping it at a lower level so I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it, then I just changed the subject. I mean I was pretty tempted to gossip because what the friend I was with was saying about the other girl wasn't coming from nowhere, but it still wasn't fully true. After all, the other girl was still my friend. The girl who was gossiping is not normally a gossiper, so when she says anything like that she really means it. However, it felt great to not get into any of this whole gossiping-thing, and afterwards I just felt marvelous.
This challenge was SO good, I mean it really made me realize how much people are actually gossiping, it's scary. Now that I was in it, I just hear it all over. Whenever my friends were gossiping this past week, just a tiny but or whatever, I most often just said nothing or changed the subject. And yes, a big yes, I felt the Holy Spirit telling me not to say anything in those situations. I am definitely up for doing this for way way longer. Maybe for life. Hopefully.
Thank you so much for inviting me to do this!