Be an Encourager...but Start at Home!

Being an avid web surfer, I find many amazing web sites and/or blogs that I really like and want to go back and visit. One little solution I find is to subscribe to the site if I want to stay in touch with it. That happened recently when I found a challenge for a simple, organized Christmas - with a day by day post from Kathi Lipp. Apparently, this site is on to another challenge: "Praying God's Word For Your Man". Between today's challenge and a podcast I heard this morning, I got a clear message in my heart - Be an encourager and start at home!

Each woman is either building up or tearing down their homes. Usually I relate this to 'making' the home, keeping it in balance, doing what is good, putting effort into making it a place of comfort, peace where the family can come and find a haven.

I read a fantastic article about encouragement over at Revive Our Hearts. It told about the power and need for encouragement and then admonished..."We are to encourage one another daily... and then some action...Ask the Lord to impress your heart: “Who is someone that You’ve put in my life right now that You really want me to make an intentional effort to encourage?”

Now the kicker...we start with our own families. It’s really hypocritical for us to be trying to encourage everyone else in the world and then being discouragers inside the four walls of our own homes. Do we encourage people outside our home more than you do the people who live in our home?

Now, I think all of us, if we’re honest, would have to say sometimes it’s easier to encourage people outside our homes than it is to encourage the people we live with all the time because that’s where we let our hair down. That’s where we don’t worry as much about manners, though we should, or how we affect each other, though we should. Sometimes we’re just tired of the people we live with. The people we go to church with or the people that we work with, well, we can muster up what it takes to encourage them. The starting place for the ministry of encouragement should be in our own homes.

May we be stirred to be a builder of our homes and also our families with the power of encouragement!

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