Encourage Yourself!

Our devotional life is more like sowing, waiting and reaping. Whatever we sow, we will not usually be able to point to immediate results or benefits, but fulfilling the time requirement, a harvest becomes visible.

What we sow today will require an entire season of growth before the results are manifested. What are you sowing in your emotion? Like you already know, things will always go wrong and most time successively worse than what you thought you have gone through; and I am sure you know now that many other people have gone through what you are going through and many other people will go through what you are going through.

Permit me to give you a scenario to learn from as it is easy to learn from other people’s experiences that expect to live long enough to gain the experiences yourself. In 1 Samuel 30:1-31, we find the story of David and his men. David before now has gone through so much circumstances and situation that threatened his existence from the point he killed goliath. What there any reason for him to have been depressed if he wanted to? Yes; A million and more reasons.

From the scripture (1 Samuel 30), David and his men had returned to their city only to discover that their city had been raided by the Amalekites. They had nothing left to hold on to. Their city and houses were burnt. Their wives and children were taken captive. They have been raided to a pin! They have lost everything! Humanly speaking, what hope is left?

To react to what they had come into, David and his men wept. They wept so much and so loud that they became exhausted. They had no more strength left in them to even weep – 1 Samuel 30:4. After crying what else? When this go wrong people cry, it is part of expressing your emotions and hurt; but after you cry, what else? For a distressed David, at this stage he wasn’t only grieving for his family that had been captured or his properties that had been burnt but also his grieving men who in the same situation with him, wants to stone him to death. They blamed David for everything; their loss and families that have been taken captive. They were bitter in spirit towards David.

Most times people will blame you for even their faults. They will go to the point of ‘stoning’ you and believe such experiences are not ever funny. People might be bitter at you for whatever reason and it will always hurt. At this point, David would have been depressed if he took to react to this omen with what has been thrown at him, but the Bible records something inspiring about David in verse 6 ...’but David encouraged himself in the Lord his God’. He encouraged himself to be positive; to dwell on believing that everything is orchestrated by God no matter how sad and painful it may be. He found it easy to pray and to receive guidance from God on how to move from the painful and depressed situation that he has been thrown into by what he has just experienced. At the end what happened, he and his men got everything back.

You may never know what blessing is just a positive thought and action away from gaining when you wallow in self pity and depression.

It is with Love!
I am @outhori5ed