The Text Message That Killed My Son

There’s a phrase that many of us learned as kids: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words could never hurt me.”

If you’re anything like me, your parents or teachers taught it to you — almost like a comeback — to keep you from “tattle-taling” on someone who said something that “hurt your feelings.”

Now that I’m older, I’ve realized that we’ve got it all wrong. Broken bones are way more preferable than words. Words paint scars on our hearts. They mess with our heads, and they hurt way worse than any rock that’s ever been thrown at me.

The Bible even says that words are the most powerful weapon we have.

“In the same way, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it boasts of great things. Consider how small a spark sets a great forest on fire. The tongue is also a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.” James 3:5-6

Daniel Briggs was the kind of kid you’d want your own kids to be friends with. According to his mother Amy, “Daniel was an old soul. He had a soft side of him that was second-to-none for a kid his age.”

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Unfortunately, for all too many teens like Daniel, Satan served up his schemes through a hellish dose of bullying.

In a viral video, Amy talks about how bullies led to her son’s death by suicide.

It’s been viewed almost 10 million times.

“Daniel had been bullied for most of his school career,” Amy explains.

She said that he was hit with the worst of it in high school. What had started out as words quickly turned into physical violence. Daniel’s peers would throw trash at him, punch him in the stomach, and one time they forcefully made him lick a school bus window.

His soft demeanor, and uncommon interests of hunting and trapping, made him an easy target.