A warm memory filters through my consciousness. A writing table, along my sixth-grade classroom’s back wall. Magazine photographs load it, and my teacher encourages her pupils to spend some free time writing stories based on some of them. I often sit at this table and write all sorts of things. I use it more than any other student in my class. I love it!

In the seventh grade, I write a story for an English assignment. Since I enjoy watching “Flipper” on television and live on the Gulf coast, I write about a dolphin. A day or two later, I get into trouble and my English teacher pulls me aside privately. She expresses her disappointment, which she follows up by complimenting me on “my imagination and such a fine dolphin story.”

In the ninth grade, my English teacher schedules me to take an Advanced English class under her guidance in the tenth grade. Alas, this never happens because I transfer to a different school.

Why am I sharing this? To show how important encouragement is, especially to young people. Long ago, God planted the desire in me to become a writer. My teachers fed this desire through encouragement. My fourth-grade teacher even “published” a short poem I wrote by posting it on the cafeteria’s wall. And, in the mid-1980s, the Lord began bringing this dream to pass when I sold my first article.

I truly believe these teachers’ encouragements played a role in my persistence. Despite the naysayers and those who scoffed at my dream early in my career, God enabled me to stay with it. I read writing magazines and books, took writing courses, attended conferences– everything I could think of to improve. When the going got hard and editors’ rejection slips piled up, I refused to quit because I knew for a fact God had called me into the literary sphere. Today, after forty years of writing and getting published, I’m still striving to better my craft.

Don’t neglect encouraging others in their God-given gifts and dreams. It’s powerful and brings strength in hard times as well as in good.