When I was a teenager, I was once given the assignment to speak about Barnabas for a Teen Bible study at my local congregation [1]. I, have, of course, always appreciated Barnabas for his encouraging ways, even though there are times where encouragement is not an easy matter. We may have a great desire to encourage others but for a variety of reasons we may not be able to encourage others. I have been on both sides of this particular difficulty and I tend to be deeply struck by the depth of the problem of encouragement in the way that we live our lives. Often encouragement is at the basis of a great deal of difficulty between people.
I know that I am both a person who needs a fair amount of encouragement from others and that I am not necessarily the easiest person to encourage [2]. Part of the difficulty is in the fact that I tend to want very specific things. It is hard to encourage those people who are focused on one thing or a small group of things, because their happiness and favor are very narrowly focused. It is ironic, I suppose, for people to be so unfocused in most areas of life, so scattered in their interests, and yet so focused on a few areas of happiness, but so it is. Another difficulty is in picking challenges that are massive. Those tasks that are more difficult require more encouragement and support.
Those who require a great deal of encouragement should be willing, of course, to give encouragement. There is no shortage of people in this world, or even among those close to me, who need a lot of encouragement. We all have many struggles in life, whether we are wrestling with family problems, the search for love and belonging, our needs to support ourselves and to feel respected and honored by others, or to gain success in some endeavor. These struggles often require a great deal of strength and encouragement to deal with them. Since we all have the same kinds of struggles, in our own fashion, we can gain a great deal of encouragement from the fact that others share our longings and have walked the same kind of road we have walked. Even if they have not struggled in exactly the way that we have, we can provide a great deal of help to those who struggle in the same larger quests.
Encouragement is one of the best gifts that we can give towards others. All too often in our lives we can find people around us who are negative rather than encouraging. People can be negative for a wide variety of reasons, and it is easy for us to focus on the negative in our own problems, but all the same we can treasure those people who are helpful. If we have an encouraging heart, and we find others with an encouraging heart, we can have a much better chance of reaching the success that we all seek in life, able to help each other in our mutual goals based on a shared worldview and the combination of our talents and perspectives that make us all stronger together than we are alone. It is far better to behave in such a way than to seek to do everything alone, or to drain others of energy that could be spent in ways that help us all. Let us therefore all develop our skill in encouragement, not least of all so that we can provide ourselves and those we come across with the encouragement that we all so need to be good and to do well.
[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/barnabas-son-of-encouragement/
[2] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/the-bittersweet-between-my-teeth/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/a-test-of-willpower/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/12/04/the-stern-compression-of-circumstances/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/12/02/the-turn-of-a-friendly-card/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/11/28/a-tattered-line-of-string/
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