Last week as we celebrated Thanksgiving, I was so moved by a number of different messages I received both personally and electronically that were encouraging in nature. It makes me wish that we could celebrate my favorite Holiday every month.
As most of the world now turns its attention towards Christmas, I want to encourage you to camp out on giving thanks at least for a few more days. Why should you or I wait for one time a year when we truly express our gratitude for our blessings and the people who help to create them?
As the title of my post of this week reads, I want to encourage you to exercise your intrepidness this week. Don’t worry, I had to look up the definition myself. I’m glad I did. Here it is according to the Dictionary app on my phone: Resolutely fearless; dauntless.
Why shouldn’t we be fearless in encouraging others? In a year when our world has been turned upside down, I cannot think of a better time to offer words to others to help inspire them and stimulate them to achieve greater things for themselves and others.
In my book that was published in February this year, Mustard Seed Faith, I talk about the “Multiplication Effect.” That is, as you transform your thinking to include thoughts about other people, and act upon those impulses, you bless other people, who hopefully, in turn, are encouraged to do likewise. Therefore, as a result of your love, kindness, appreciation, or encouragement, your efforts are multiplied by countless others, and the overall impact will never be known.
Don’t overthink this. It takes little to no effort to encourage another person. Oftentimes it seems that the ones we have the hardest time gifting this opportunity to are those who are closest to us and who live in the same house with us. Many times, encouragement may come in just a few or even one word. Sometimes, it might just be by an expression like a smile or a pat on the back.
I have to admit that I love the encouragement I get from people I intersect with each day. The positive motivation that I get from someone thanking me for something I wrote or said is the most rewarding thing I get from the content I create each week. My prayer each week is that I will never know, or seek to find out, how much of an impact I am making, but that I would just keep doing what I’m doing, with the hopes that it is being multiplied to a number I will never know.
This truly is, as the old Christmas song by Andy Williams goes, the most wonderful time of the year. Yes, the world is scary right now. Our future is less certain perhaps than at any other time in our history because we don’t know when things will return to some semblance of normal (whatever that is). All of these things over which we have zero percent control.
What you can control is your kindness, your words, your heart, and how you use all of those things to encourage other people. It is the most wonderful time of the year to that. Every day of the year.
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