Encouragement Coexisting With Discouragement

Paul refers to how opposites often coexist, such as joy and sorrow existing together (2 Corinthians 6:10, 7:4). If you do something good, and it gets a bad response or less of a good response than it should, that's discouraging. But there's a sense in which that poor response should be encouraging, if it reflects how much the work you've done is needed. When there's a widespread problem, you typically won't see a major change for the better as a result of the work of one person. Usually, any improvement that occurs as a result of one person's work, especially in the short term, will be of a lesser nature. It's important to judge your work (and the work of others) objectively. If you've done something that should get a particular type of positive response, that's a different issue than whether it will get that response. If there's a problem you're addressing, how surprised should you be if the people perpetuating the problem (e.g., through their apathy) don't respond well when you try to solve that problem? If your work passes the test of being objectively valuable, the poor response to that work should remind you of the fact that your work is needed and perhaps even needed more than you previously realized. That should encourage us, though I'm not denying that the situation is simultaneously discouraging in other ways. It's a mixed situation. The point I'm making here is that we shouldn't think of it as solely discouraging.