The scene for today’s story is set in a sales conference where the year’s awards are being given out to the lucky few achievers. One woman who had performed spectacularly well and earned an extraordinary amount of salary and sales bonuses over the year, gave all the credit for her achievement to her sales manager.

As the woman stood before a crowd of 3,000 people clutching her sales award, she recalled the depression she had been in for the previous two years when everything seemed to go wrong. The future looked so bleak that she was ready to resign and take on a less demanding job and had even spoken to her supervisor several times saying she was going to quit. But Joan, her manager kept on persuading her that she hadn’t tried long enough and that she would not have been hired if they didn’t think she had the potential to succeed. Her voice sometimes cracked as she related her story to the assembled delegates and she made this insightful remark, “For all those months when I wanted to quit and didn’t think I had any future with this company, Joan believed in me more than I believed in myself and she wanted me to succeed even more than I did, and she was proved right”

The history books are full of stories of gifted people whose talents were overlooked until someone believed in them. Take Einstein for example, he was four years old before he could speak, Isaac Newton received very poor reports at primary school and Walt Disney was once fired by a newspaper editor on the grounds that, “He had no good ideas to offer to the paper.”

Surely one of the attributes of true Christian character is our willingness to encourage and to lift other people. So in our dealing with others, are we problem-focused or possibility focused?

“We have to concentrate on our capacity to live fully. It’s not a question of expending all our energy and feeling depleted, but of using up our energy in fulfilling ways.”