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The Power of Encouragement
by Calvin Miller
Life is hard. Faces are hard. We get out of bed and hustle off to work for the day wondering who might assail us or what circumstances will befall us. Terrorism looms menacingly over the predictable world we once knew. Many of us feel powerless in our jobs - and, even worse, we feel that we are allowed to make no significant decisions. And since our decision making is so often what authenticates us, we are forced to live with a self-image that is limited at best.
We are electron-isolated Internet inmates, channel-surfing lounge lizards, the point-and-click hermits of a day that doesn’t care. We are social creatures shut into solitary confinement by television tubes. Eyes eager to meet other eyes spend the hours instead gazing into the blue glare of computer screens or staring down at the tiny displays of e-books.
But here and there, we run into those who actually see us. They smile at us. They greet us. They compliment us. In those moments we catch our breath. The world stops. We emerge from deadness to life. We are real persons - with real nervous systems, real feelings, and real hearts.
Then comes the ultimate gift that ends our mediocrity. Someone speaks to us, perhaps relating some affirming comment as simple as, “Hey, I like your cap, man!” The cap! I’d forgotten I was wearing one. But it wasn’t my cap you really liked, was it? My desperate ears might as well have heard, “Hi there, you wonderful homo sapien, you, I’m a homo sapien, too! Isn’t it nice that we who live on the same level of the food-chain have actually met?” Such moments of random affirmation are made all the more wonderful by their rarity.
I experienced one such moment of encouragement one day in the most unlikely of places - an airport security line. I travel a lot, and I have learned not to expect any charm to issue from the airport security people. They do not often say anything warmly human. If the beeper goes off as I pass through the scanning arch, they brusquely ask me to empty my pockets and walk through again. If I continue beeping, they ask me to step to one side while they pass a cattle prod over my body in a matter-of-fact manner, seeking to get whatever they suspect me of carrying to beep. My self-esteem plunges. I want a cordial security officer to smile at me. But their cattle prod is as warm and cuddly as they get. Alas, it seems they are convinced that I must be a terrorist. So I have developed an advanced case of scan-o-phobia. I freeze up as I approach security lines. Beeper-tense, I dream of passing through beep-free.
I had been on the road all week, and I was weak. I approached the security checkpoint with the usual apprehension. But on this occasion a sweet southern belle at the X-ray machine said,
“May Ah see your boardin’ pass, honey?”
I looked around. There was no one in the line behind me. She was talking to me! She seemed buoyant and warm, overcome with emotion. I was dumbfounded. Had she been addled by the X-ray?
Dutifully, I handed her my ticket.
“Thank you, sugah,” she said. I liked this lady! She handed my boarding pass back to me and said, “There you go, dahlin!”
Whoa! Box me up and put me in the window of the shop! And glory upon glory! When I walked through the X-ray arch, I didn’t beep. “You’re mighty clean, sugah,” she said as she handed me my briefcase. “You have a real nice flight, honey!”
“I don’t wanna go!” I wanted to say. “I’ve felt more like a person at your X-ray machine than I have on any other flight I've ever taken. I’m not leaving till you finish building me up!”
Of course I did ultimately fly on, but that woman gave me a gift I have never forgotten in the thousand X-ray lines at security checkpoints I’ve been in since. She blessed me as a fellow member of the planet. She was a sympathetic earthling who was open to seeing others as fellow passengers on the way through life’s journey.
I don’t know who told that woman that we are all life’s pilgrims, but I know she believed it. She had blessed me with the rare gift of affirmation.
Some years ago Ken Blanchard wrote a book called the ‘One-Minute Manager’, in which he said that affirmation was the soul of leadership. The key to great interpersonal relationships, he said, was to catch somebody doing something right and praise them on the spot. The book remains a best-seller.
I speak all over the United States in churches of all sizes. The message from the pulpit is always friendly. But after church it seems there is an appalling lack of Christian affirmation among the members of the congregation. An older couple recently met me at the airport in a distant city to take me to a banquet hall where I was to speak to their church. The drive from the airport took the better part of an hour, and as they drove, they poured out their hearts to me. They confessed that their church was warm, but not very friendly. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well,” they said, “Our church is awfully activity oriented, but I can’t remember the last time that someone actually said, “I love you. You’re important to me!”
I thought of my church. Had anyone said that to me? Had I said that to anyone else? The answer to both questions was, “Not often!”
I wondered why that was. All of us possess a wonderful power to touch other’s lives. It is the power of affirmation! Why don’t we use it?
The world is waiting to be renewed, and we hold the power of renovation. It is a wonderful power that changes hell to Eden one compliment at a time. God has called us to glory, and the calling leaves behind us a golden track of human worth. So come with me. Let’s change the world.
Oh, and by the way, I like your cap, man!
Calvin Miller
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