Who is your Paul? Your Timothy? Your Barnabas?
In recovery and life, we all need someone who is further down the road from us [a Paul] that we can look to for wisdom, guidance and occasionally a loving rebuke when they see us stepping into some old destructive patterns from our past.
We also need a Barnabas, don’t we? This person is someone that is walking the journey alongside us that can offer a word of encouragement in the journey. I don’t know about you, but I am so grateful for those ‘Barnabas’ people in my life. Sometimes we can view the ‘Barnabas’ people in our life as the ones that only speak words of encouragement.
Although this is so valuable for us, I think it is just as valuable for me when the ‘Barnabas’ people in my life speak truth in love. Sometimes the greatest encouragement I can have is someone willing to speak truth in my life with a healthy balance of grace. They don’t beat me over the head with it, but gently point out the cracks in my armor. I don’t want someone that will tell me what I want to hear but instead what I need to hear. I need someone who loves and cares enough about me to tell me the truth because they don’t want me jumping back into old patterns of destruction.
Now that is encouraging!
The cool thing about it is when we have a Paul and Barnabas in our life, we grow and change as we daily turn our will over to God’s care and control daily. Then, we get to turn around and share those fruits with someone else. Then it becomes a time to go find our ‘Timothy’ to pour into from our own experiences.
What a great gift to be able to share with someone else what we learned from our own ‘Paul’ and ‘Barnabas’ in our recovery.
As Pastor John says, a great TEAM value for us to follow in ministry is to “Seek Accountability. We need to find someone to hold us accountable for our actions and decisions…to help us stay the course.”
Who is your Paul, Barnabas, and Timothy?
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