Making the E List
Shining the Light of Encouragement
by David Jeremiah

It doesn't take a lot to be an encourager. Far too often, we think we're not equipped to be an encourager. We don't have the words, wisdom, or wherewithal to truly make a difference. We may be too discouraged ourselves to think we can encourage anyone else. But that's untrue. Sometimes the smallest gesture, the simplest word, or the shortest visit can be enough to shine a light of encouragement into someone's life.

"E-Opportunities" are all around us! What we need is a plan to encourage, to shine the light of Christ's love into a dark situation. Make an "E-List" of all those people with whom you come in contact regularly and can encourage.

To prime your encouragement pump, I've listed below some categories of people for you to consider-and some ideas on ways to brighten their day (or even change their life).

Encourage Your Spouse
Husbands and wives have a non-optional responsibility before God to encourage each other. "Husbands and wives, dwell with each other with understanding, giving honor to each other as heirs together of the grace of life" (1 Peter 3:7). I don't know of anything more encouraging to anyone than to be understood and treated with honor.

Submitting to one another, serving one another, sharing in each another's deepest and innermost thoughts, dreams, fears, and fulfillments are evidences of understanding and honor. While the ways of expressing these priorities will be as infinite and varied as the marriages where they exist, the result will always be the same: encouragement.

I've given the most space to the importance of spouses encouraging one another because it is life's most demanding and fruitful relationship, and it sets the pace for all other human interaction. I believe that adults who are encouraged by and in their marriages will overflow in that encouragement to everyone else they meet.

Encourage Your Children
Encouraged and encouraging parents will produce encouraged and encouraging children. Living life with a "Yes!" perspective instead of the all-too-common "No!" should be our guiding philosophy with children. Look for things they're doing right instead of things they're doing wrong. With children, love is spelled t-i-m-e. The psychological myth propagated years ago that it's the quality, not the quantity of time that is important in raising children has, thankfully, been debunked many times over. Children who don't think they're important enough for their parents to be with them can easily grow discouraged-especially in the years of adolescence when the critical process of self-definition is taking place.

Time with children can be spent in actual one-on-one activities, writing notes and letters, listening, preparing favorite meals, celebrations of victory and consolations over defeat, and in simply being in the home instead of being somewhere else. The secure child is an encouraged child, and the encouraged child becomes a secure adult-and the cycle begins again.

Encourage Your Neighbors and Coworkers
If you're a Christian, you have a special ability to encourage those who may not know Christ, because you've lived from both perspectives and they haven't. Not only do you know first-hand about life's discouraging moments, you've learned how knowing God can make a difference.

Many non-Christian friends and neighbors don't know anyone they can unburden their soul to-and they don't know how to reach God. So God sends you and me to be as available and compassionate to them as Jesus Christ is to us. Encouragement is seeing a need and filling it: a compliment at work, a meal for a sick neighbor, a small gift of appreciation, an invitation to your home, a listening ear over lunch. Encouragement isn't complicated-it's a matter of our willingness to invest ourselves in the lives of those God places in our path.

Encourage Those You Don't Know
Maybe the most overlooked opportunities we have to deposit a word or act of kind encouragement into someone's life are with those we don't know personally: the clerk, repairman, the person we sit next to at . . .

Our challenge is not identifying those who need encouraging, it's developing a lifestyle of encouragement. Make every day an "E-Day" to remember!

Saturday, August 15, 2009