Garrison Keilor, of Lake Wobegon fame, tells of a daddy who had nine big strapping sons that formed the starting lineup of the best team that ever came out of Lake Wobegon. The daddy was the manager and he always found fault with anything his sons did. When one of his sons hit a home run, he would say something like, “Boy, he put the old apple right down the middle, didn’t he? Blind man coulda hit that one. Your gramma coulda put the wood on that one. If a guy couldn’t hit that one, there’d be something wrong with him I’d say. Wind practically took that one out of here, didn’t even need to hit it much.”

If you think that is bad, you should have heard him when one of them made a mistake. It was obvious that this wasn’t “home on the range” because there was always a discouraging word. His sons could never please him, and if they did, he forgot to tell them. Once his oldest boy, Edwin Jim, Jr., ran to the centerfield fence for a long fly ball, threw his glove forty feet in the air to snag it, and caught ball and glove. His daddy said, “I saw a man in Superior, Wisconsin do that a long time ago but he did it at night and the ball was hit a lot harder.”

This leads me to believe that those boys could have used some encouragement along the way. What is true of sons in general is also true of sons of God. That’s not to say that there is never a time to rebuke, but when Christians are rebuked all of the time, without encouragement, they tend to lose heart. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Barnabas. He was known as the “Son of Encouragement” (Acts 4:36). I could use one of his sermons from time to time. Couldn’t you?

This leads me to another thought. Maybe it would be well for all of us to turn our attention to the neglected area of speaking words of encouragement. Would this be unscriptural? I don’t think so. My Bible teaches me to “encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all” (1 Thessalonians 5:14).