Over the TopSample

Have you ever eaten a giant plate of pancakes for breakfast, and felt full, so you went on with your day, but after 45 minutes, your hunger returned with a vengeance? There is a scientific reason for this. Essentially, everything in pancakes gets converted into sugar, and when this happens, you feel full, but sugar is the first thing that gets burned off as your body needs energy, and it gets used up quickly.

This is similar to the way that encouragement works on our souls. When you encourage someone by saying something generic, like, "Good job!" or "Nice work." You don't tell them what they did well or why — that kind of encouragement is like pancakes. It doesn't last long.

Encourage someone with specifics by saying something like, "I appreciate how you helped me with my homework last week," and pair it with how what they did impacts you by saying something like, "It made me feel cared for," that is a recipe for encouragement that lasts. When we say what we encourage others specifically and connect that to how it affected us, that will help sustain people well into the future.

As we learn to encourage in ways that last, our words do what Proverbs 16 describes. They become sweet to people's souls and healing to their bones.