Most of us would never stand for someone telling us that “your life stinks and it’s never getting better”, but we never challenge our own thoughts and affirmations when we accuse ourselves of the very same thing!
One of the consistent messages that our culture pushes is to “be positive”. Nevertheless, so many people that I have interacted with over the years, both at the Rescue Mission through our programs and in my ministry of helping and training leaders, are convinced that their lives are terrible and never going to get better.
How can you live a good life if you are caught up in negative thinking and living with a viewpoint that is consistently pessimistic that things will ever change for the better? Simply put, you can’t! So much of our thinking is regurgitation. To regurgitate literally means to pull something up that had been digested, to vomit back up, so that you can review and re-chew it. This is exactly what negative thinking is, and this regurgitating on the garbage of life holds many people in a negative pattern. If you are stuck in negativity, think about what you are repeatedly thinking and believing to be true!
You will never achieve happiness waiting for all the circumstances in your life to arrange in perfect order. The truth is that happiness and positivity are not connected to circumstances. Neither positive or negative thinking are connected to reality as you know it, instead they both dependent upon faith. To sustain a negative attitude you need a faith that things will not change, that everyone is out to get you, that you are consistently going to be the victim, that your circumstances are permanently stuck and that you have no control over what happens to you.
In a like manner, but in the exact opposite way, you need faith to be positive. Here are a few things that, when you focus on them, will help you to replace negative thinking with a faith-filled positive outlook:
God has a plan for my life – god has a plan and purpose for everyone. Even if you are living less than your potential, caught up in pain, addiction and negative habits, you can always begin to do what’s right and find your God-given purpose.
Great things are coming – So many people wrongly believe that things will never get better, that it’s getting worse. I don’t believe that. In the life of a large ministry such as ours, Every generation has believed that they lived in the toughest possible circumstances and that the political and moral foundations were crumbling around them. I’m not silly enough to ignore reality, but I also know that we are the most blessed generation in the history of the world to this point. Great things are happening even in the midst of difficulty and challenge.
You have Choices – so often our despair comes from feeling helpless to control our finances, weight, addictions, and relationships. But you really aren’t helpless, you have choices. What kind of person do you want to become? What do you want to eat today to be healthy? What kind of people do you need to hang around? You have choices! Don’t settle for living the same miserable day over and over again. Make a change. Act on faith that positive things happen when you focus on what is good.
David Curry
