Give Someone a Lift with Your Words

This post is for Five Minute Friday, a community of writers who use a one-word prompt to write for five minutes with no planning or editing. Today’s word is “lift.”

Lift is what brings someone closer to the sun. To the rays that warm her face.

Lift is what helps an airplane off the ground.

To lift up someone requires more work than tearing them down or letting them struggle on their own.

To lift up requires me to go under. To lift up someone requires humility.

What a challenge that is. I wanted to tell my husband the other night how much better he is at calming one of our children than I am. But the words stayed in my head for a long time before I could say them.

I expected that if I told him how much better he was he would start giving me tips on how I could do it better too. And I really didn’t want to hear that. So I held in the encouraging words that I wanted to say.

But finally, I humbled myself, and used my words to give him a lift. And he didn’t start giving me advice or telling me what I was doing wrong.

He offered me some encouragement as well, saying sometimes I’m the one the child wants and not him. Sometimes I’m the parent that gets the job done.

To lift up someone we may have to be courageously humble, but we don’t stay down. We feel the lift too.

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