Encouragement, Part III + New Email Schedule (Non-Monthly)

If you opened this to learn about my updated posting schedule, scroll to the bottom; it’s the last section before the end.

For the rest of you, this letter follows my May and June 2025 letters, in which I wrote about encouragement and how I perceive it to function.

In “Encouragement, Part I”, I came to the conclusion that encouragement uses evidence to infuse a person with hope that spurs them to action.

In “Encouragement, Part II”, I wrote more specifically about using accurate evidence to offer real hope that spurs people to right action, including why discouragement sometimes has a purpose, and how those of us without the spiritual gift of encouragement can still grow in this area.

This letter is the conclusion of this series about encouragement. What, specifically, tends to encourage people?

Whatever actions you might try, start with genuine love as the root.

If God is the source of our ability to encourage, then to imitate God Himself, who is Love, is necessarily to encourage out of a place of love.

I hope you have experienced the encouragement of genuine, self-forgetful love. It doesn’t force us into someone’s mold, or seek its own interests, but spurs us along the path God has given us, even clearing obstacles of self-doubt and others’ expectations, to make us braver, stronger, more peaceful, more truthful.

True love tells the truth (i.e., accurate evidence). Sometimes it doesn’t need words, just enough tangible kindness to remind us that continuing is worth the effort. Other times, love is very specific in verbal encouragement.

The felt love of another human, whether a person who knows us well or a very kind stranger, is evidence that life can be better, that someone cares, that the work is worth the price of perseverance.

Much more than that, God’s love in the world offers legitimate hope. The hope of God encourages us in suffering, and tells us that the world is not meaningless. The hope of the Lord is not put to shame (see Romans 5:3-5). Real hope necessarily leads to action, and Part I says more about that.

Love doesn’t encourage people to do just anything—see the section titled “Right Action (or When Discouragement Has a Purpose)” in Part II.

Love “does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6, ESV). Love encourages repentance when appropriate—appropriately tells someone to stop doing something, to turn toward God instead.

But love also is humble when defining “wrongdoing”, and is gracious, no longer judging as humans but submitting individual opinions and cultural ideas to the Lord.

In my experience, love often is a general source of encouragement—“keep going, keep living, keep working, because it is worth it”—but I believe love should still be behind attempts at more situation-specific encouragement.

I think I’d assumed encouragement was merely a verbal skill, a social skill. This would explain why I wanted to explore the mechanics of encouragement in the first place, and why it took me writing multiple long letters to come to the conclusion that love must be the source.

But words do encourage (and discourage), and I’d like to discuss some of these more practical realities.

Generic phrases of encouragement (e.g., “You can do it!”, “Don’t give up!”) have a place in honest, loving encouragement. I think these phrases contain implied evidence on the basis of trust: you seem to believe I should keep doing something, and I trust you, so I will keep trying.

Or, these phrases spur me to think about why you might be saying that, and I can think of reasons—evidence for hope—on my own.

Yet if someone tells me, “You got this!” with nothing to back up the assertion, it is empty. I experienced exactly this recently while duckpin bowling with a group. Contrary to our friend’s attempt to encourage me to bowl well, I did not, in fact, have it.

(I did bowl a few decent frames—in the context of amateur duckpin, which is still mostly bad—and those provided much more hope, which spurred me to keep trying to knock all the pins down.)

Compliments are encouraging for me, if I believe they’re based on accurate observation: “You have done this. You are doing this. Therefore, you can do this.” The very nice things some of you have said or written to me about these posts have definitely encouraged me to keep writing such letters.

Last, but not at all least, authentic testimony is a potent form of verbal encouragement.

Tell people what God did in your life. Tell us how you got through the hard thing. There is hope and confidence in the fact that this honestly happened to someone and it turned out. The testimony of people I trust is always evidence in my court.

I observe that the testimonies people most want to hide are often the ones that encourage me the most: How God turned shame into glory. How God healed a personal health issue. How God turned what otherwise would have been darkness into brightness like midday (as described in Job 11:17, Isaiah 58:10).

These precious testimonies from others are sources I return to for encouragement.

Discouragement may look like the opposite of these things. Assuming your goal is to encourage, do not state or imply that a person’s work is going nowhere, or that things will not get better; don’t tell related stories of failure that don’t pivot to success or solid redemption.

Start with love—not fear, anger, frustration, or obligation.

Find the encouraging truth: “You’ve worked so hard.” “You still have time.” “You are valuable whatever happens.”

Or, try to say nothing, and let your loving actions encourage.

Loving actions can encourage, especially in a general sense. Knowing that little things like delicious food, time with friends, clean spaces, help with unwanted tasks, and time spent in fresh air can encourage me temporarily, perhaps I should offer those to others more often, as a vehicle for love.

Temporary encouragement has value, yet perhaps out of love, to carry love, these things would have a greater effect.

When it comes to being discouraged, and therefore needing to take courage for ourselves, taking right action can begin a cycle of seeing that our actions have a worthwhile effect, encouraging us to try more.

Our actions can also encourage or discourage specific actions in others.

We know that children pick up on the behavior modeled for them, sometimes to concerning (or hilarious) effects. But adults do, too. I notice myself picking up behaviors that are modeled for me now, especially if they resonate with my values.

As with testimony, the acts and observed consequences of people I trust and respect can spur me to take my own actions on the basis of their evidence.

When someone is brave, it encourages me to be brave.

When I rest enough, it encourages others to rest enough.

On the flip side, when people I trust and respect watch a lot of TV with no observable negative consequences, it encourages me to do the same.

I am encouraged to write, draw, and paint more often when I observe other people writing, drawing, and painting (even just visiting a museum has such an effect). When other people clean, it often encourages me to clean.

This might be a gray area between encouragement and motivation, but I think the evidence of a little effort creating a nice place to live does give me hope that I can do the same.

In general, to keep living when things are hard, to keep pushing forward and trying to be better and to thrive, can encourage people to keep going, too. To despair and give up can discourage others.

Encouragement and discouragement by action, for good or bad, don’t seem to stop when we’re older. This suggests actions are more than important for their own sake. Actions can spur actions in others, for good or for bad.

If actions encourage, a collection of habitual actions must also encourage.

I started thinking about what my behavior encourages earlier this year, when I came across an article published last year about a study on American inter-generational economic mobility (Annie Lowrey, “Poor Black Kids Are Doing Better. Poor White Kids Are Doing Worse.” The Atlantic, 25 July 2024).

What struck me were the conclusions at the very end: the primary deciding factor for which groups are doing better is whether the adults in that neighborhood were employed. Not the parents in a child’s household, but the adults in the neighborhood.

A quote in the last paragraph of the article, from John Lettieri, president of the Economic Innovation Group, explains:

“Neighborhood conditions are an early-childhood intervention, positive or negative, shaping what a child is going to become. Think of those early impressions: What is an adult? What does an adult do? How do adults behave? What kind of opportunities are people engaging in? That all happens silently,” he said. “But kids pick up on it.”

I hadn’t really thought about whether my activities shape the worldview of the people around me, but they might, in a tiny way. Any culture encourages or discourages, for better or for worse.

This applies to culture at large, and microcultures, like the culture you create in your household. This article by Dr. James Emery White (a pastor I quote often, because I follow his blog) is worth reading in full: “Your Church’s Culture”, Church & Culture, 4 January 2018.

In it, he quotes an article from Harvard Business Review, including this line about culture in business organizations: “Cultural norms define what is encouraged, discouraged, accepted or rejected within a group.”

Dr. White then applies the ideas about organizational culture to churches, encouraging them to actively create, and protect, the kind of culture they want to foster.

He writes, “Simply put, you create a culture through what you value, what you model and what you teach.”

Part of this is an ordinary human desire to be what we see, and the desire to fit in, sometimes despite discouraging evidence.

It is worth being aware of what the culture around us pushes us toward, and it’s worth being aware of our opportunities to encourage people rightly through the visible effects of loving, healthy microcultures.

As I said in Part I, encouragement is not the same as persuasion, motivation, or manipulation. If you’re trying to control behavior using encouragement, I discourage that.

Love—which doesn’t control people—must be the root.

If the ability to act on these ideas feels out of reach for you, I encourage you to read the section titled “Parakaleó, Again” in Part II. It’s a little biblical evidence that we really can grow in this area, because the God of encouragement, Who is love, helps His people imitate Him, encouraging us that we may be able to encourage one another.

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A couple of weeks ago, I attended Gen Con (the big nerdy convention I mentioned last month), and I tried a few events at its Writers Symposium. I learned many modern speculative fiction authors are finishing multiple novels each year. While I cannot keep anything near that pace, and my goals differ, it did encourage me to work a little harder on my own novel.

This month, I’ve made some progress in the written story as well as in some specific worldbuilding, mostly location design.

I used to think that working on these posts didn’t affect my novel-writing, because my nonfiction way of writing involves a very different mental state. I was confident the time wouldn’t have been used for fiction regardless, so I was not losing anything.

That may have been true before. Now, though, as I’m working more on my novel again, I’m finding that these letters are occupying the time I want to use for fiction. Since I believe I ought to prioritize my novel, I am planning to experiment with a quarterly-ish email format.

I say “ish” because I might send something in the in-between months, if I have something to say. When I need a break, or want to prioritize novel-writing, or have nothing to say at all, I won’t.

Regardless, I plan to send something every three months, starting with this October (for a January, April, July, October schedule), until I communicate otherwise.

Thank you for reading and subscribing! I still intend to send work that’s beautiful, interesting, and useful.

That’s it for this August! If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:

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To truth, love, and adventure,

Rae

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