What Seminary Shifted: I Let Other People Encourage Me

I like to be the cheerleader. I don’t like needing cheerleading myself.

I am a words of affirmation gal, so I know I need encouragement, but I’d really rather live a life of getting everything I need from the Lord, rather than feeling desperate for people to see me and speak life into me.

Unfortunately, we’re not created for self-sufficiency.
We’re created to need one another.

Our Triune Godhead proves the beauty of communion and interdependence, so isn’t it wild that we wish we could just be completely self-sustaining and upheld by our own thoughts? Yes, it’s wild. But it’s human.

All that being said, going to seminary for three years, I didn’t just learn to receive affirmation from other people. I realized I NEEDED affirmation from other people.

• I needed the early days of seminary, where my stepdad would ask me questions about what I was learning, his face lit up and glowing with pride for me.

After he passed, that was one of the biggest hits of grief for me. I didn’t realize how much his affirmation meant to me and how reliant my soul had become on it.

Grief has a way of showing you what was holding you up the whole time.

• I needed my friend Skyla to get tough with me when I seriously considered quitting seminary. She told me I absolutely couldn’t quit and continually told me how proud she was of me for persevering.

• I needed the gentle affirmation of my team at Go and Tell Gals, when they saw me overwhelmed and exhausted.

And then, the final push…

• My husband provided the most extravagant display of encouragement for the end of seminary. For over thirty days, he arranged for my friends and family to send me a video of them speaking life over me via email. Every day, at 5am, I had a video waiting in my inbox. Sometimes I’d watch it as I made my coffee and prepared to start a study session, sometimes I’d save it until later in the day when I knew I’d feel weak and tired.

Some love arrives in your inbox at 5am for thirty days, and you don’t even realize you were waiting for it your whole life.

As I kept thanking Nick and my friends, I found myself saying: this wasn’t just a nice gesture. I needed this. I could never have asked for it, but it kept me going.

And isn’t it kind of God to use my study of theology to drive home this theological truth:

We need people. We need the Lord, but He has given us one another and invited us to “spur one another on toward love and good deeds” (Hebrews 10:24).

The aim of life is glorifying God, not living independent and strong.

His power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9), and His glory is deeply magnified when His people encourage each other in their kingdom capacity.

Let yourself be cheered on.

Let yourself be carried.

Let the people who love you do the holy work of speaking life into your tired body and weary mind. It is not weakness to receive it - it is the very design of God.