KneEmail - a devotional by Mike Benson associated with Forthright Magazine
Kneemail - Encouragement
THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL and straightforward way of winning with people is to give them a compliment -- a sincere and meaningful word of affirmation... If you want to make others feel like a million bucks, you've got to master...
WHAT IF SOMEONE knocked on your door today and asked, "Could I sell you some misery today...? What have all kinds for sale." Would you buy it? Of course not, but many of us, including me, have "bought" it...
THERE IS A certain convict that I have been corresponding with for several years down in Texas that recently got a "new" typewriter... He had completely worn out the old one. It was not very easy to correct his...
THE BIBLE ACKNOWLEDGES the problem of anxiety... An awful lot of people's answer to anxiety is medication. I certainly don't want to make light of the very serious issues of anxiety with which many people must cope in their...
SOME TIME BACK I read a statement which really got my attention... The statement declared that a little, tiny gnat can wreck an automobile. Of course, I wondered, "How?" And the article then explained that a tiny gnat had wrecked...
WHICH OF US is not guilty of cutting other people down just for the laughs...? We enjoy our biting sarcasm and our abilities to ridicule, our stinging quips, our sharp put-downs. The best humor, of course, is joking at our...
HAD IT NOT been for a confident and encouraging wife, Sofia, we might not have listed among the great names of literature the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne... When Nathaniel, a heartbroken man, went home to tell his wife he was...
AS A MAN Thinketh by James Allen is arguably the best non-inspired book ever written on the power of thought... Allen compared the mind to a garden and its owner to a master gardener. A good character is not the...
WHEN SIR ERNEST Shackleton set out to sea in 1914, he did so with the ambitious goal of making the first land crossing of Antarctica... But his ship, the Endurance, never even reached its base camp. It became stuck in...
IN HIS LITTLE book Fully Human, Fully Alive, author John Powell relates an experience which happened to a friend while he was vacationing in the Bahamas... The friend was sightseeing when he noticed a crowd gathered toward the end...
A HOSPITAL ADMINISTRATOR was startled to see a patient fleeing down the hall from the operating room... He stopped the patient and asked, "Do you mind telling me why you ran away from the operating room?" The patient looked at...
YEARS AGO AN experiment was conducted to measure people's capacity to endure pain... How long could a bare-footed person stand in a bucket of ice water? It was discovered that when there was someone else present offering encouragment and support,...
THREE PEOPLE WERE visiting the Grand Canyon -- a painter, a preacher, and a cowboy... Looking over the massive canyon, each one verbalized his observation: "Incredible!" the painter said. "I'd love to paint a picture of this!" The preacher waved...
FOR THE FIRST time in her life, Western Oregon University's Sara Tucholsky not only hit a home run in a game against Central Washington University, but she hit it over the fence... She had passed first base and was on...
WHEN I WAS a little kid, I got a pretty nasty burn on my leg... The doctor applied a bandage designed to adhere to the burned skin. The bandage was made of a material that had a healing ointment in...
MARY KAY ASH encouraged her employees at Mary Kay with a an attitude of celebration and blessing... She signed hundreds of birthday cards offering free lunch and a free movie. She commemorated employees' "blessed events" such as weddings and babies...