Encouragement 1 of 4

Hello again.  I’m starting a series that is based on the whole concept of encouragement.  For those of you that like to follow along sometimes with these topics I’m looking in the twelfth chapter of Romans, pretty much 9 through 21.  Today I want to talk about the fact that everybody needs a little encouragement and I’m borrowing some concepts from a talk I heard by one of my friends on staff, Dale, and I hope to have Dale on with us later this year talking about various aspects of spiritual formation, spiritual development. 

Today I want to talk about the fact that everyone needs a little encouragement. There’s 5 key points here.  First of all, everyone needs to be listened to. Now you think, ‘well that’s not hard’, but how often do you listen to people?  I think about that a lot as I have been out of my stage of professional listening as a counselor and I think in terms of the normal, everyday interaction it’s not often that we really focus on listening to people.  Even when I communicate with my wife, sometimes we’re both on a different agenda and we want to get in our next piece of information. So, I think one of the best ways to encourage people is by being quiet.  Now that sounds really funny, I’m sure, but when you’re quiet you’re showing somebody that you care enough to listen to who they are.  Who they are being, what they are doing…and that listening allows them to express themselves in ways they may not have been able to do if you had been trying to talk a lot. 

The second point is that everyone needs to be appreciated.  How often do you appreciate somebody?  I think that I do appreciation a lot.  I like to affirm people.  But, at the same time, I will go for a period of time and not affirm.  I also have noticed a troubling characteristic about myself, in that I tend not be as affirming of the people that I work the most with than I am with other people.  If I’m just meeting somebody and chatting with them or renewing a relationship, I can be quite affirming.  But as I get into the normal projects and tasks of work, I don’t always affirm.  So I need to grow in that area. 

The third point is that everyone needs to be understood.  Understood.  That is, people need to feel like someone else understands what is going on with them. Particularly, what is going on inside of them.  That is really, really important.  Can you describe the people around you?  What is going on inside of them?  If you’re like the rest of us, you probably can describe very well, or at least think you can describe very well, people… maybe 2 or 3 people…maybe your spouse…but what I’ve noticed is that what I think is going on often is what I believe is going on and then I act as if that is really the case.  And sometimes that sets me up to be misunderstood and to misunderstand them.  As you look at this, think through some ways in which you might be needing to ask clarifying questions with people in order that they can feel understood. 

A fourth component in terms of encouragement is that everyone needs to be forgiven.  Wow. This is a hard one.  I should have edited this out because I think all of us have situations where things have arisen where it’s hard for us to say, ‘Well, I can forgive’.  Or we might forgive on a superficial level and then in terms of the more deeper level, we may still harbour things.  Sometimes that makes people feel like we’re being dishonest with them because they may see us in the future and it looks like we didn’t forgive.  I know this one is going to require a lot of work on your part, but you might want to think if you have forgiven other people.  Now I’m not saying that we can just decide that we’re going to forgive and be all done with it.  That’s a whole other series.  But I think we need to work at or look at ourselves and say, ‘Is there somebody that I maybe need to go and talk to?’, not to go through a whole, big forgiveness thing but just to kind of start the process of normalizing after the difficulty has been committed or experienced in the past.  Hard work.  I know. 

The fifth and final one for today, before I go back and review, is that everyone needs to be encouraged to press on.  I think my biggest part of that right now is in a relationship that I’m having with my daughter.  She’s struggling with finishing up school and it’s easy to talk as if you’re not really going to make it.  It’s easy to say, I don’t know if I’m ever going to do anything.  It’s also easy as a parent to say, ‘Stop that.  Don’t talk that way.  That’s not right’…but I think what I get out of this ‘encouraged to press on’ is there is an understanding that all of these 4 build up to this 5 because if you’ve been listening to the person, if you’ve been appreciating them, if you’ve been helping them to feel like they’ve been understood, particularly those first 3, then the encouragement to press on carries a lot more weight.  I know that if I just cut my daughter off when she’s explaining about something, she usually doesn’t respond very well.  But if I listen for a while, I give her the sense that I’ve understood, and then we talk about options of pressing on.  I think she does much better in terms of taking that and going on with it.  Now I want to stay with that relationship.  Is she only pressing on because of my support of her? Well, no.  She’s doing a whole combination of things.  Support from other people, her own drive, her sense of who she in Christ for example… All of that works together.  But having somebody who she knows is part of her encourager team I think can be very helpful to help her keeping on.   

So what about you?  So how about you?  As you’ve been listening to this, remember I’ve said everyone needs to be listened to, appreciated, understood, forgiven and encouraged to press on.  As you think about this between now and the next time we talk, I want you to look through the people around you and see if there’s anybody that you need to listen to a little more.  And if there is, take the time this week to pick a couple of them out and listen to them.  Make an extra effort to do that.  Is there anybody that needs to be appreciated more?  Maybe colleagues at work, coworkers who have been labouring hard and haven’t…at least you can’t recall appreciating them.  Make an extra special effort to do something that says I APPRECIATE YOU.  Even if it is saying, ‘I appreciate you’.  That’s okay.  Understanding.  Is there anybody that you need to work at a little bit more in terms of understanding? That would be good to do this week as well.  And then the forgiven thing.  You know, I know that’s hard, but maybe something will come to you that you need to forgive or you need to be forgiven.  I know sometimes as Christian people we don’t always think we can be forgiven for everything and that’s kind of a crisis of faith for us.  You might even need to be forgiven by somebody this week. And finally, the pressing on.  I think in your context, living where you don’t necessarily belong, working in environments that probably aren’t the most encouraging for you, you need specifically the encouragement to press on. And I want to do that to you.  I want to say, ‘Hang in there.  Find people that you can encourage and that can encourage you.  Try to put things in a way in which they are manageable and doable.  And keep pressing on.  So between now and the time I talk to you again, you’ve got a lot of things to do. You need to find people around you that you need to listen to, you need to appreciate, you need to understand, you may need to forgive, and you need to encourage them to press on.  Like I’m encouraging you.  That sounds like a lot, but I think it would go very quickly when you find out you’re having fun doing it.  So go with God’s grace. 

Talk to you next time.