Spread it Liberally

 Devotion for the Week...

The WIPS-B-GONE challenge is almost halfway finished. Day 50 will be this Thursday, November 11. It is so much fun to scroll through the hashtag and comment on each photo, reading about daily progress. It's especially fun when I get to help celebrate a finish! What has been fun, too, is seeing that other challenge participants are also scrolling the hashtag, commenting and celebrating. It's a WIP finishing party that spans several continents and I love it!

My dragon cross stitch was the project that started the whole challenge and I'm slowly picking away at finishing it. I worried that my IG followers might get sick of seeing it, since it's not a quilt, but that doesn't seem to be the case at all. Every post about the dragon will get comments like "the dragon is looking so good!" or "you're making so much progress!" or "you're really rocking along!" The encouragement always feels great and helps keep me motivated to work on the backstitching again the next day.

Writing to the Thessalonians, Paul said, "encourage each other and build each other up, just as you are already doing" (1 Thessalonians 5:11). That was the last sentence in a section about being alert and aware, ready for when Jesus will come again and it was directed at all of the people, not just the head of the church. The implication was that everyone would be involved with encouraging and lifting up all of the other believers around them, knowing that this would help everyone to stay focused on God.

The world can be distracting and discouraging. It's easy to get pulled into the messiness of life and to let our focus shift away from God. What a difference it makes if we have an encourager, though! Someone who can cheer us on, who can lift us up when we're having a hard day, who will remind us that "Christ died for us so that, whether we are dead or alive when he returns, we can live with him forever" (v. 10).

Encouraging others doesn't cost us anything and it doesn't require a lot of time or special training. All it takes is a willingness to focus on the people around us and to cheer them on. With just a little effort, we could all be spreading encouragement everywhere we go.