How Much Courage Do Most People Run On?

Hey friends, I’m on vacation in Wyoming for a week, so I pulled this blog post out of the archives from 2012 (have I really been blogging that long?) My dad worked for Amoco Oil, so I hope you appreciate the picture of oil rigs I found in his honor. If only I could make it scratch-n-sniff, so you could get the whole experience. I tweaked what I wrote and will share my words with you while I’m enjoying a handful of peanut M&M’s out of the jar in my mom’s kitchen in Wyoming. I hope you have a great 4th of July!

Our friends came in bragging last night because their new hybrid Prius registered 67 miles to the gallon on the way to our house. Gloating unabashedly, they parked right next to our friend’s gas-guzzling suburban.

I thought about the fuel efficiency of people. It’s astounding the amount of encouragement we require.

We are guzzlers.

In our house, there lives a man who needs courage to keep standing in front of people and speaking truth, who needs his wife to respect his decisions, who needs support in looking out for his mom, who needs help making sure that boy of ours writes all his graduation thank you’s.

In our house, there lives a woman who needs courage to keep hitting “send” on blog posts, who needs to know she’s still beautiful, who needs a blessing to look out for her mom, who needs lots of hugs because her baby is going to college soon.

Paul says to the followers of Christ:

“Encourage one another and build each other up…”  (1 Thessalonians 5:11 NIV)

“I wonder if it’s just me,” I asked my husband, “or does everybody feel a little insecure and a little afraid all day long?”

“It’s not just you,” he said.

Paul didn’t single out a group of people as insecure scaredy cats. His command shows a universal need we all have to find courage for the day, to have courage to live the way God wants us to live.

So if you feel like you need some encouragement today, you do. It’s something you can ask the Lord to give you. And those people you live with and work with– even the ones who seem like they have their act totally together –you can know for sure that their spirits need bolstered, too.

How about this assignment you can do right this second? Use a sticky note to build someone up with words. Try a sentence that says You are__________ or You can____________.