Who Can You Encourage This Week?

My daughter in college recently tested positive for COVID and has been quarantining at home with us, which means that my wife and I have also been quarantining at home. So, I wasn’t able to preach live at Alameda on Sunday.

It was too late in the week to find someone else to preach for me, so I decided to record the sermon at home in a video that would be shown to the congregation and used in our livestream.

This was not optimal for how we like to do our worship services, so I felt really bad for having to show a video sermon as it would change the experience that people at our in-person service would have. I was also feeling very self-conscious about how effective or ineffective the sermon would be via video.

Immediately after the sermon video was shown, I got a text message from one of our members who wrote the following: “Prayers for your family. The Lord works in mysterious ways and your message today might have been more powerful remotely. I think people were paying attention even better. We are all in this together.”

Wow!

Even though I didn’t realize it until I got that text, that was exactly the kind of encouragement I was needing to hear because it reassured me that people got something of value from the sermon in spite of how it had to be delivered.

I’m so glad that God put the idea of that text message on the mind and heart of that member and that the member followed through on the Spirit’s prompting!

And it made me think about times where I’ve had the thought to send or speak an encouraging word to someone but didn’t follow through on it.

Maybe that person needed to hear a word of encouragement (like I did)…

And maybe God wanted to use me to be a source of encouragement to that person…

But I didn’t do it.

What a missed opportunity!

Can you relate?

If so, let’s make a commitment to each other that this week we will pay attention to those promptings by the Spirit and follow through…

Because there are people all around us who need encouragement…

And we can be the vessel God uses to bless those people.

So, who can you encourage this week?