enCOURAGEment
I've started Beth Moore's study on Paul, "To Live is Christ." In today's lesson, she briefly taught on the word encouragement and how the word courage is at it's root. She talked about Barnabus, a man named Joses who was renamed the Son of Encouragement by the disciples.
"Because Barnabus -a good man full of the Holy Spirit- believed in people, many people ended up believing in Christ," she writes. That's amazing! God used Barnabus to give others courage to be the people He called them to be. Amazing.
Barnabus believed in people.
That thought stayed with me today. If I can encourage someone every day, I feel fulfilled. Who God made me to be. To believe in people.
I thought of the people who have encouraged my children, believed in them, and at the top of the list is a teacher whose blog is linked to mine. When she taught Syd in the second grade, she was also one of the teachers who had car line duty, which meant she helped get the kids into their cars. She always talked to Ben, buckled up in the back seat ready to pick up his brother. He was very shy and wouldn't look her way. She always commented on his costume, which varied day to day. She came to one of Syd's soccer games, and Ben's trust was finally won. He shared his "Ben" stuffed rabbit with her, an ultimate prize.
Over the last few years, she has mailed Syd and Ben things she had in her classroom. They send her pictures, cards. She sent Syd a sock monkey the class had. As her husband has struggled with cancer since we have known them, the boys have prayed for her, genuinely concerned for her.
Her husband passed away only days ago, and she is blogging through her grief. She is encouraging without really trying, speaking straight from her heart. She is full of courage and imparts it to others, again without really trying. Who God made her to be. Today as I read of how she found a secret envelope in her husband's dresser drawer with plans for a trip for them to Italy and money to make the trip, I lost it. She was rejoicing ... she is courageous like that. My heart was breaking... wanting him to still live, hating the cancer that took him away from her.
And I think of little Alden, who so many are praying for right now. How much suffering she is experiencing as she battles leukemia. I met her when she was in remission and rejoiced with her that the leukemia was gone. She was radiantly healthy. I was so grieved to find out it had returned.
Alden has courage and she is an encourager. She faces this latest battle with a smile and makes friends with whoever knows her story. She captures your heart. Her light doesn't go out.
These are the people who encourage me. The ones who for all their suffering on their own personal roads remain a light. Who don't sugarcoat the pain, and have an Anchor that keeps them afloat. Their lives encourage me to pray for and encourage others.
Who encourages you?
He found them in a desert land
And in the wasteland, a howling
wilderness;
He encircled him, He instructed him,
He kept him as the apple of His eye.
As an eagle stirs up its nest,
Hovers over its young,
Spreading out its wings, taking them
up,
Carrying them on its wings,
so the LORD alone led him,
And there was no foreign god with
him.
Deuteronomy 32:10-12 (nkjv)