The Encouragement Challenge

From Google Images

I heard something on the Christian radio station more than a week ago that has stayed in my mind.  I want to share it because I think it is a great idea, but I don't know who to share it with, and so I am putting it here where it will most likely be read by my very encouraging family and friends!  On the program they were adapting something from Revive Our Hearts called the 30-Day Husband Encouraging Challenge and making it more general, so that you could choose to do this for anyone you wanted to improve your relationship with.   You can find the original, more detailed program here .

The basic gist of the adapted program is this.
1.  For 30 days you don't say anything negative to your person, or about them.
2.  For 30 days you do tell your person something good that you notice about them , and you also tell someone else something good about them.
3.  You find a small way of serving them each day.

The only other guideline they suggested was that you only do one person at a time, though I think it is implied that you don't go announce to your chosen person that you are doing this.

There were some pretty incredible stories about how wives participating in this challenge had seen marriages restored that had seemed doomed.  One lady was so worried that she wouldn't have one nice thing to say about her husband every day that she carried around a notebook so she could write things down when she saw them just in case she saw two one day and none the next.  She was surprised that at the end of the 30 days, her notebook was full.

A lot of the good things I have done are, at least in part, due to the encouragers in my life.  Without the encouragement of Derek and my kids I probably would have quit writing songs -- or at least been afraid to share them.  Without the encouragement of my parents I might never have made it through reading the scriptures the first time.  Sometimes Derek's encouraging, "We can do this" as he heads off to work helps me to get through the day.

So, we can do this!  We can all be more encouraging if we put our minds to it, and it might make a much bigger difference than we expect.