Do you have an encourager in your life? Someone brave enough to tell you the truth? Here's Nancy DeMas

Walgamuth. Encouragement isn't just saying, I love you, I think you're wonderful. Sometimes encouragement is saying,

watch out. I think you're vulnerable there. This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMas Walgamette, author of Adorned.

For February 21st, 2020, I'm Dana Gresh.

What do you do when you're discouraged? Who you go to in times of difficulty, struggle, or failure?

The last several days, we've been talking about how God created us for relationship.

Today, Nancy talks about the importance of friends who help and encourage each other

through heartaches, hard times,

and desperate places.

When the white man first arrived in North America, the Native Indians did not have a written

language or alphabet, but their vocabulary was often more eloquent and more expressive

than that of the French and English explorers.

For example, the word friend was understood by the Native Americans as one who carries my

sorrows on his back. Isn't that good? One who carries my sorrows on his back. That's a real friend. And we've been talking

about friendship, relationships, why we need them, why we struggle with them. We've talked about

the problem and the pain of injustice, of oppression, of painful relationships. We've talked

about the problem of isolation, just aloneness.

And now we're talking about God's prescription for both painful and non-existent relationships.

And that is God's desire that we should have intimate relationships, not injustice, not isolation, but intimacy.

The passage we've been studying together is Ecclesiastes chapter 4. And a lot of Ecclesiastes talks about the meaninglessness, the vanity,

the emptiness of life under the sun. That phrase that appears 26 times in the book of Ecclesiastes says that life without God,

relationships without God, relationships lived apart from God, are empty, they're meaningless,

...