Friday, January 25, 2013

Compliments go a long way

Thursday night on the way home from Band practice an interesting thing popped into my mind.  It was totally off the wall and I really don’t know what made me think of it, other than God wanting to show me something.  So anyway Kara was not at home when I got home, I got on Facebook and posted that “the next 10 people to private message me will get something for free from me” Well who doesn’t want something for free?  If I saw that I would be the first to jump in. I thought it was going to backfire because it took a little while before someone finally bit.  Guess what the free thing was….a compliment.  Yes, kind of goofy I know.  The thing about it though was that the more I did it, the more I wanted to do it.  Not only the responses much better than I thought they would be, my response (Which I had not considered) was unbelievable.  I am more of a realist I believe, than a pessimist or optimist.  But lately I have been depressed because I have felt alone and down.  Here almost a year later after diagnosis, the rush of people to console the family and to bring meals have waned.  Life has become fairly normal since there has no news, good or bad, in my fight against brain cancer.  The thing about doing this though, it made ME feel better about things, even though I was complimenting others.  Funny how God works things out.  Some of the things that just came out of the first batch of compliments……I got to tell my brother I love him (Probably the first time ever)  I got to connect with old friends and talk about things we did at School and previous Churches we attended, I got to pray for some people for things I had no clue about before this.  And that was only the first batch of people.  So I posted again and got even more people to give in to their curiosity.  Both the recipient of the compliment and I were truly blessed just from the simple act of telling them something positive.  I am now hooked.  I have had even more send me messages today just to say hey and ask if all the “free” stuff is gone.  Nope, I have all the free compliments you could ask for. 
I blogged about this today, after a long time of not blogging, because God has found yet another way  to change my life just by complimenting someone on a strength they have, or something they did for you in the past. We as humans, and especially Americans, have come to the point where everything we hear is negative, the news, the newspaper, even on Yahoo.com.  News has become the most negative outlet we are bombarded with constantly.  I challenge you to do something similar to what I have done, get people to talk to you and then compliment them.  If it takes doing something like I did and build up enough curiosity in people to contact you, then do it.  If it is telling someone you have known forever that you really appreciated that thing they did 20 years ago for you, tell them.   It will open things up between you  to talk about, and hopefully become involved in their lives again.  I am addicted, if you want a compliment, send me a text, private message in facebook, or just email me at gregelmore1212 at gmail.com  I would love to tell you what you mean to me.  Will you do the same for others?