Encouragement in Community
Dear Beloved,
One of the last things I have to share with you guys about community is encouragement. I can not express enough how important it is to feel encouraged in your community. Correction, support, and inspiration feel so little and worthless without encouragement.
Anyone who knows me knows that I struggle a lot with worshiping publicly. I tend to get in my head and freak myself out. Then once I hit the wrong note or miss a beat, I had a hard time getting back on it. I would shake, cry, freeze up, and one time I stood up and ran to my room. (Church is at my house.)
It is a day I will always remember, not because of the embarrassment, but because of my church's reaction. My lady pastor comes into my room and simply sat on my bed, played with my hair, and listened to me cry. She didn’t yell at me or force me to go back out. She really did sit there talking to me until I felt better. It took a couple of weeks, but pretty soon, I was singing again. Mind you, I still freak out, but I’m not at bad as I used to be. And it’s because of the support and encouragement I received that night. Any other reaction from her and I don’t think I would have sung again.
Encouragement is important to Christians all the time. Not just when we mess up. Throughout the Bible, we see the difficulties of actually being a Christian. In Romans, Paul is writing to Rome about him finally being able to go and bring them spiritual gifts to help them grow. And in verse 12 (Romans 1:12), he writes, “When we get together, I want to encourage you in your faith, but I also want to be encouraged by yours.” In a good community, encouragement should go both ways. Without encouragement, motivation will come and go in waves.
If you’ve noticed, everything in this series goes hand in hand. Correction can’t be effective without encouragement and support and vise versa. Encouragement can’t be effective without support and correction. In the same way… If all of this is carried out biblically (as it should be.) Then your community can also be inspiring.
When it comes to the people we hold close to our hearts, our standards have to be high. Don’t settle for the community. We can’t be comfortable with compromising correction for accessibility. The moment we play with compromise, we are putting our faith at risk.
