A Word of Encouragement
Proverbs 16:24 Kind words are like honey; they are easy to accept and good for your health.
There’s a great line in J.R. Tolkien’s book (and now movie) “The Fellowship of the Ring”. The wise old Gandalf says this: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Most of us – well, it’s not that we decide to do bad things per se, it’s just that we never actually decide anything much at all. We live day by day without thinking too much about whether we’re going to be a blessing, or a burden to other people.
It’s almost as though we live like the proverbial Pavlov’s dogs – stimulus, response, stimulus, response. We react the same way each time, based on habit, based on entrenched patterns of behaviour.
Someone irritates you, you snap at them. Someone’s nice to you, you smile back at them. Over and over again, without ever thinking, without ever deciding what to do with the time that’s been given to us. And so … life slips away on you. It’s pretty scary when you think of it like that.
But what if you decided, each day, to be a blessing to other people – beyond what you do right now? I’m sure you bless some people some of the time. But what if you made a conscious decision, if you haven’t already, to be a blessing each day to someone new? Now there’s a radical thought.
Do you want to know the quickest, easiest way to be a blessing? Encourage someone. Just a short SMS, a quick phone call, a pat on the back, an email, a Tweet, whatever.
“Hey, I was so impressed with how you handled that! Thank you. I really learned something from you today.” Imagine if you received an SMS like that today. How would it make you feel? Blessed, maybe?
The smallest encouragement from someone on a bad day is like a ray of sunshine that completely lights up your world.
So, imagine if each of the 7.5 plus billion people on planet earth, encouraged just one person each day. Just one! That would be 2.74 trillion encouragements in a year. Imagine what a different place the world would be. Imagine how many fewer arguments there’d be; how many fewer depressed people there’d be; how much more we’d all get done together.
Kind words are like honey; they are easy to accept and good for your health. (Proverbs 16:24)
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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