Encourage Someone Today
With his mouth the godless destroys his neighbor, but through knowledge the righteous escape. -- Proverbs 11:9
I am a lazy person. I am not real smart and I do most things the wrong way. How do I know? I am surrounded by people who tell me so every day.
A friend goes through something similar with her mother. Fortunately, her mother dotes on her grandchildren. Unfortunately, her view of their mother remains the same as always.
What really tears me up is that people criticize her for the way her children reject their grandmother. It isn’t enough that she takes her children to visit their grandmother. Or that she tries to care for a woman who treats her so badly. Don’t these critics realize that children hear everything? They’re smart enough to know that their grandmother is saying bad things to and about their mother. Of course they don’t want to be around her. They love their Mom.
Instead of feeling sympathy and encouraging this young woman who is in such an awful place, they condemn her. Yeah. That’s right. Blame the victim because the abuser has hurt feelings. Makes perfect sense to me.
I have no words of advice for her. I can’t even tell her that it gets better with time. Honestly, I think dealing with it just gets worse. How do you balance the biblical call to care for your parents and the very real need to protect yourself from verbal abuse? How do you keep forgiving the same people day after day -- something Jesus told us to do -- and not let it destroy you? I haven’t a clue.
The other night I listened to a man on a radio talk show telling his experiences as a child and the horrible things he learned in school. He learned he was fat. He learned he couldn’t play sports. He learned that people laughed at him when he didn’t understand something. Fortunately, in seventh grade he came upon a teacher that cared about him. She directed him to public speaking as an extracurricular activity and he excelled. The next year he had yet another teacher who encouraged him. Both, he found out later, were Christians.
Encouragement. Maybe that’s the key. We can’t change the people in our lives who are determined to knock us down at every turn. But we can encourage one another and provide a welcome respite from the cruelty the world sometimes dishes up.
The tongue that brings healing is a tree of life, but a deceitful tongue crushes the spirit.
-- Proverbs 15:4
Oh, by the way, that man who suffered so much early in school later became a teacher. A really good teacher. I don’t know his name but in 1986 he became teacher of the year for the entire nation. All it took was someone who cared enough to encourage him so that he could become the person God intended him
No comments:
Post a Comment