Encouragement is what the world needs now more than ever.
Do you hear it? Listen carefully. Now do you hear it? No? Okay, then turn on your television—any channel will do. Now do you hear it? Still no? Well, it’s there all right, but you might have missed it. Go to your front door and open it wide. Listen to the sounds in the streets. Did you hear it? Believe me, it is there!
This time close your door, turn off the television, and listen to the sounds in your own home. Do you hear it? To be certain, listen to your own heart. You hear that? Of course you do. It’s unmistakable, coming through loud and clear: “I WANT TO BE LOVED.” But wait, there’s more. Listen closer: “AND I WANT TO LOVE.”
A WORLD’S CRY
If you tune in to this world of made-in-the-image-of-God people, you will hear a cry to be loved and to love. These are two of man’s most basic desires. We are shaped by those who love us or refuse to love us, and by those whom we love or refuse to love. Love is crucial! This is no news to God—He created us for love. And Jesus said our love for God and for our neighbor is the fulfillment of all the law of God.
The world cries out for genuine love, love which heals, unites, and encourages. Dr. Karl Menninger, famed American psychiatrist, found that people who are able to give and receive love recover more quickly from their illnesses. In contrast, individuals who lack love often develop personality scars and some even die. Love is essential to our emotional, physical, mental, and social well-being.
In his best-selling book, Games People Play, Dr. Eric Berne discussed the tremendous human need for encouragement, by word and by touch, to keep their spinal cords from shriveling-–to keep them alive, eager, and confident. His book highlights the variety of games people devise to win this sort of healing attention.
Historian John P. Koster documents some experiments that demonstrated the severe impact on a child who feels unwanted:
It’s a well-known fact that children who receive an inadequate amount of love from their parents either die in infancy or grow up to be mentally and spiritually stunted adults. Stories about the absence of love are frequently found in literature beginning in the earliest days of history. In Herodotus, a Greek historian who wrote about 400 B.C., we find a narrative concerning Croesus, a fabulously rich king of Lydia, who performed an experiment in which he hoped to find out what the world’s oldest language was.
Croesus rounded up some unwanted babies, isolated them from all human contact, and had them suckled by female sheep until they learned to talk so that he could hear what language first came out of their mouths. According to Herodotus, though the children failed to thrive, they did survive, and they first uttered the word bekos. The king’s courtiers couldn’t agree whether this was an actual word or an imitation of the sheep.
More than a thousand years later, according to a papal historian, the strange and mysterious German Emperor Frederick II decided to carry out the same experiment, but this time the infants all died before they were old enough to speak because they had been deprived of human affection expressed through the stroking and cooing of their nurses.
David Jeremiah, The Power of Encouragement
www.jesusfilm.org
