Gift Number Eighteen — JC's Village

Last Sunday I wrote about taking a break from negativity. Today’s gift riffs off that and takes it up a notch - because today’s gift is intentional positivity.

Before I started down this road - I didn’t really appreciate the power of not being negative. But there’s something even more powerful than that - and that is not just keeping your head, your thoughts, your heart out of negative territory (because, truly, that kind of thinking is incredibly limiting and exhausting), but positioning yourself so as much as possible your thoughts are oriented around positives.

Honestly - I think this power is accentuated profoundly by all we’re all experiencing right now. There are a lot of negative emotions running amok these days. Even people who aren’t typically negative are finding themselves easily overwhelmed by it. Meetings turn into opportunities to vent. Get-togethers become occasions for discharging all sorts of negative and stressful emotions.

There is another option.

Imagine how different you would have felt yesterday if you’d spent the few moments you’d had to yourself replaying a favorite memory, or a favorite song, or meditating on a favorite passage. There’s something abrasively exhausting about worry, complaining and rehashing - it wears us down. There’s also something just so positively hopeful and uplifting about having happy, spiritually nourishing things to occupy your heart, mind and spirit with when you’re walking to and from, or driving here and there, going about your tasks and chores and responsibilities.

I used to be really, really good at thinking about all the things that could go wrong (commonly known as worrying) - but turns out that this is a less than ideal strategy for dealing with grief, illness and trauma or any other negative thing you want to move beyond. So - I started replaying vacations - especially the best moments - in my mind - especially whenever I started to feel overwhelmed by stress, grief, etc. I mean - by all means - be a real human - and acknowledge what you feel. See it. Name it. Call it what it is. Reach out to a friend or loved one and ask them to help you process it. Help them process their stuff. But usually that exchange doesn’t take all that long. After that though - move on - and park your mind on something that will help you recover, re-center on God’s goodness, and heal.

Imagine - instead of carrying around a huge mass of negative thoughts, concerns, open-ended uncertainties from moment to moment - carrying thoughts that fuel, energize and restore you.

It is awkward at first - for sure. But the littlest clues can ben super helpful reminders. I like to to put another vacation picture on my phone’s lock-screen to help me remember what kind of thoughts I want to keep in my head - or whatever will remind me best. It’s so much easier to come up with better solutions to the pesky problems and irritations of the day when we’re not weighed down and burdened.

And isn’t this exactly what Paul’s telling us is good to do in Philippians 4:8 “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things”

May your hearts, minds and souls be full of His Light!