encourage one another

Encourage one another…

“When do I feel most encouraged?

What’s happening to me and around me that creates that sense of being encouraged?”

I feel most encouraged when someone takes a moment and reaches out. They enter into my world, and they say with words or actions. “I care about you.” “I am with you.” “How are you doing?” Sounds a little incarnational, right?

If you’re like me I spend most of my time being self-absorbed in my own day, my own agenda, and what I’m doing. But I’ve found when I take five or ten minutes, and pick up the phone and call another person and simply say, “I was thinking about you…wanted you to know how thankful I am that we are friends.” When someone reaches out and they have no agenda, no reason, no purpose other than to speak words of life. There is no follow up business question. Just calling to call.

Or writing a note. I enjoy writing short notes to people and mailing them. I try to write two a day. Not email, not text, not DM. An actual piece of paper and a pen. When I’m writing a letter, I think about that person and there is a connection for a few minutes. And when I’m writing that letter, I often find myself praying for that person as I write. It’s special.

Rarely do people write notes anymore in our age of technology. We too often look for quicker, more efficient, more in less time, more productive. Could it be possible that the best things we do aren’t necessarily quicker, efficient, or “productive?”  The most encouraging things in life aren’t really that complicated. A phone call or a pen and a piece of paper, and maybe a stamp. (I had to show a college kid one time where a stamp goes on an envelope, because he had never mailed anything before! Ha-ha).

A phone call…a note of encouragement. It communicates those things we most need and want to hear: I care about you. You are not alone. You matter.

Encourage one another…