Edification part 1
You all know I'm hard to bother, right? I'm mostly unflappable. But one thing I REALLY don't like... is bullies. It drives me nuts when someone thinks they can be mean just because they're bigger or stronger than someone else. And I know this has rubbed off on Logan, because he always sticks up for the little guy. Which, in my opinion, is how it should be. And Romans 15:1-2 seems to agree with me. "We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let every one of us please his neighbour for his good to edification." Taking care of people. That's why we are connected to people. That's what LOVE is. I remember one time I had a random thought and I put it on my Twitter, and it went like this: "What's it called when you bend over backwards for someone...? Oh yeah, its called love." Because love doesn't demand its (HIS) own way. Love is patient and kind. Love takes care of others. Now check this out, because this is what I want to explore for the next few days: "Edification" is number 3619 in Strong's Greek Concordance and it means, "architecture, that is, (concretely) a structure; figuratively confirmation: - building, edify." Basically, its the concept of building someone up instead of tearing them down. Which, I think, is why bullies make me so mad; they try to make themselves look bigger by making others look smaller. They don't understand that the tide raises ALL of the ships. When one of us succeeds, we can count that as us ALL succeeding. Because we are ALL members of the SAME body. And how much more CAN we ALL succeed if we work TOGETHER! Song of Solomon 5:16 describes the man (Jesus) as, "...altogether lovely. This is my beloved." And I believe the reverse of that is true as well. Jesus is altogether lovely. And we--His body--are lovely all together. There are some things that I can't do. Luckily, those are the same things that you CAN do. So while none of us can do it alone (no man is an island, and it is not good that man should be alone) together we can do anything. The biggest problem I find is that a lot of us are already beaten down by life to the point where we don't think we can do anything. We've let mistakes, or setbacks, or failures define us. We don't see ourselves the way we really are. We see ourselves the way the world tells us we are. But the world only knows the outside. The surface stuff. There's something INSIDE--the hidden man of the heart--that is our true identity. And that part needs to be nourished. It needs to be built up on that strong foundation that is the Rock (that is Jesus. That is love). My last verse for today: Proverbs 22:6, "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." Train up a child in the way he SHOULD go. Its so much easier to build something correctly than it is to fix something that's broken. So if you're in a position to encourage someone... to build them up... to let them know how wonderful they are... I think you should do it. Because the world needs more of that. The world needs more edification. We don't need to know what's WRONG with us. We need to know what's RIGHT with us. Because when you KNOW what's right with you, you can stop trying to be someone you're not. You can embrace who you are, and BE who you are. And then YOU can build someone else up too!