Day 35: Positivity

It is AMAZZZZZING how easily negativity crawls right into our lives, unnoticed, unchecked, and slowly starts to warp our outlook. In this day and age it literally takes zero seconds to find it. Talking to people we have to dodge dart after dart of complaints, problems, gossip. Turn on the TV or radio, flip open the newspaper or a magazine, switch on the internet and woooooosh, a world of bad news awaits your perusal. It is a difficult world, in the midst of a careless, desensitized generation, and these are scary, dangerous times.

But we have a choice what we feed ourselves. When we have to deal with difficult people at work, we can try to select positive filling friends and family to spend off time with. When we have to deal with hard, frustrating circumstances during the day then the last thing we need to see after work is some heart breaking 11 o'clock news or a suspenseful murder mystery.

I once heard this great concept about dealing with people in tricky situations. If you need to talk to someone about something, or confront them with difficult issues, then make sure that you say 8 positive things before the 1 difficult thing. The hard to hear will not fall on such hard, cold stone if we put a nice soft landing down first! And I thought tonight... this should be applied to everything! It doesn't have to be 8 to 1. Lets say 3 to 1. That would be adequate enough to test out my idea. If someone brings us bad news, or a stressful topic enters our day or our mind, we can find 3 good things to break its fall before we "chew" it. Or if we are about to read an article on Yahoo News, and it looks like it might have some negative subject matter, we can stop and read 3 great success stories first... or think of 3 great things that Jesus did today!

And, we can do others the favor too. If we have some bad news we heard and we want or need to share, we can give them 3 positive things first. If we have something critical or difficult to say about somebody, then we can try to have 3 positive things to say about them first. It might keep us off that fine line of gossip too!

I don't know. I just realized today, how many times my mind is infiltrated with heavy topics or burdens or thoughts... and not typically because I sought it, but because it somehow entered my day. And often we can push past it without too much effort... but what about those other times? What about those times when we are in a darker season of our walk, and our load is a little heavier than usual?

Its just something I thought was kind of cool for me to do. I'm gonna try it tomorrow!

Off to sleep! Thanks Papa for an amazing day! You are so incredible!!! And I POSITIVELY, absolutely ADORE You, God!