day 3K253: Understand…Validate…Encourage

“That day the Spirit led him to the Temple. So when Mary and Joseph came to present the baby Jesus to the Lord as the law required,  Simeon was there. He took the child in his arms and praised God, …”

To finish out this week, I am going to write on three very important and impacting things we each need and we each need to do.  That is to understand, validate and encourage others.

Today, let’s talk about the importance of validating.  Work has validation built in as a requirement.  When we complete something, anything, we look to have it validated through approval before we move it forward.  The entire hierarchy of organizations is built on this premise.  If we didn’t need validation then many layers of management and supervision could be removed. But, we know this can’t happen so it falls on us to be good at validating.  To do so we need knowledge, understanding (wrote about this yesterday) and the confidence (sometimes the courage) to be a strong and reliable validator.  For those who do work, they also need positive validation to be sure that they are moving in the right direction and achieving what is expected.  Maybe today, a good task would be to evaluate whether or not we are being our best to be a good validator.

Mary and Joseph more than once had to wonder, “Is this all real?”.  They had many a night, away from home, with lots of time to think and talk (hard to even fathom a life without some form of media to fill our nights, huh?).  So, in those down days as they proceeded in their lives they likely questioned what they had seen, heard and thought they knew. What they needed was a validator.  And, then they got one.  Simeon validates the Christ-child for them and for us and leaves us with the impact we can have when we validate the power and presence of Christ in the lives of others.

Reference: Luke 2:27-28 (New Living Translation)

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *