Build people up, not tear them down

This post came to my mind as I drove to work today. No idea why I thought of this, but here you go.

Over 8 years ago we had recently moved and was in a new ward at church. Only a few weeks, maybe it was a month or two after we moved in this happened... I had met "lady"(I don't even remember her name) a week or two earlier. We lived around 2 or 3 blocks apart. For the record, ward sizes in Utah aren't a very big area, so you usually live pretty close to everyone else in the ward. We were sitting down waiting for church to start and "lady" sitting at the opposite side of the church talking to someone and was talking loudly enough that I could hear her clearly. "That's my new neighbor. Hi new neighbor! Hi new neighbor! She is NOT very friendly!" I was sitting there thinking, wow could she possibly be talking to/ about me? I didn't really think of her as a "neighbor" since we lived a few blocks apart in a ward with very small ward boundaries. I glanced towards her to see who she was talking about and she was staring at me, giving me a dirty look! I had no idea she was talking to me. As "unfriendly" as I am, if I had know I would of at least said hi back.

Now in the same ward something else happened... I was going through the horrible heartache of infertility and also (not acknowledging it at the time) dealing with deep depression. On two to three different occasions a different lady in our ward told me "You look beautiful today" or "You look beautiful in that shirt". It made my day.

As I drove to work thinking about these two woman I thought, You need to build people up, not tear them down!