“Commission Joshua, and encourage and strengthen him, for he will lead this people. . .
Deuteronomy 3:28
Two writing groups were formed at the University of Wisconsin. Both groups were comprised of bright and talented writers. The men would meet and share their writings with the other guys for evaluation. The critiques were so critical of each others writing that they named their group The Stranglers.
So, some of the gifted women decided to form their own writing group and called themselves The Wranglers. They also read their writings to each other for comment. But with this difference: they didn’t criticize. The comments were positive. No matter how poor or undeveloped the writing was, they found a way to offer encouragement.
Twenty years later, a university alumnus researched the careers of his classmates. The two writing groups were examined. Not one of the talented Stranglers ever became successful. By contrast, a half dozen of the Wranglers became well-known writers. One of them, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings even won a Pulitzer prize in literature in 1939.
If someone tells you the opinions of other people don’t matter at all to them, don’t believe them. We may chafe at the thought but others have an enormous influence on who we believe we are and what we can accomplish. Yet, sports commentators often talk about the “home field advantage”? What is that? Isn’t it simply the fact that the team with a stadium of fans cheering encouragement is more likely to win the game?
Encouragement gives people strength. In the book, Band of Brothers, Stephen Ambrose relates the story of 101st Airborne Division. Before shipping off for Europe, their commander read that a Japanese Army battalion set an endurance record by marching 100 miles in 72 hours.
Not to be outdone, Colonel Sink declared, “My men can do better than that.” He picked the 2nd Battalion to prove his point. The men had to carry all their gear and weapons – which, for some soldiers, were heavy mortars and machine guns.
100 miles of the 118 mile march was over slippery, muddy roads. The weather could hardly be worse. The biting wind combined with sleet and snow. At night the temperatures dipped into the low twenties, with many boots frozen to the ground. Soldiers would have to completely unlace their boots in order to get their swollen feet back into them. Since the cook stoves wouldn’t work in the cold, the men had to survive on bread with butter and jam.
On the third day, they still had 38 miles to go. One soldier was too exhausted to stand up so he crawled to the chow line.
News of the march spread quickly in Georgia. As the weary soldiers straggled to the final mile of the march, they were met by a huge crowd who lined the road and cheered wildly for them. A band began to play.
And that is when the magic began. Malarkey, the soldier who crawled to chow earlier that day, said, he had “a strange thing happen to me when that band began to play. I straightened up, the pain disappeared, and I finished the march as if we were passing in review at Toccoa [their training camp].”
Encouragement costs us nothing, but the difference it makes for others is beyond counting.
(text copyright by Marty Kaarre)