“There is no greater gift than the gift of encouragement.”
Why would that be?
What is so special about encouragement?
Do we knot have enough courage on our own?
Seems not.
If we did we would all be bravely meeting life’s challenges with confidence and, like the Star Ship Enterprise, be ‘bravely going where no man (or woman) has gone before’!!
Yes some days we are like that, thankfully!
Other days, we’d perhaps rather hide under the duvet, afraid to read that email that might be a rejection letter … or afraid to have that difficult conversation that we know has to be had … or scared to make that doctors appointment, already fearing the worst ….
It’s in these moments of doubt that we need to hear an encouraging word.
Sometimes we like to give our fear a nicer name and call it procrastination, the “I’ll do it / deal with it later” syndrome.
It’s like we really don’t like ‘not knowing’ but we’re afraid of ‘finding out’ … so it’s easier to put it all off until ‘tomorrow’ ….
This is not a good strategy for being effective in life.
Life happens today, never tomorrow!
We are all very confident and comfortable with the predictable, the familiar. We don’t need any encouragement for that.
We just do what we did before and everything was fine, so we do it over and over. Sometimes this works .. and no courage is required.
But doing the same thing the same way over and over leads to a certain level of boredom.
And we don’t like to be bored so we do other stuff, easy ‘distracting’ things – where again we’re not challenged … life is small and safe … and comfortable …
No wonder we like our duvet days.
But, as a wise person once said to me, “we’ll be a long time dead, and after we have been dead for a long time, it will still only be at the beginning of being dead”.
A sobering thought.
What could we do (while we are still alive), that, if we had the courage, could bring fabulous rewards.
What difference would courage really make?
Where in your life could you do with having just a little more courage than you have now?
Would a little encouragement help.
You only have to (have the courage to) ask!!
Love and Courage
Eileen
