Positive Thinking Problems

I’ve been an advocate of positive thinking for decades. Just be grateful. Just be positive. Banish the negative thoughts. Don’t hang around negative people.

I was wrong.

The all-positive-thinking-all-the-time philosophy sets us up to fail. The positivity gurus have simply modified the Pollyanna syndrome: “Be positive! But not quite that positive.”

We’re all negative people sometimes, with few exceptions. I’ve known a handful of people who truly were positive all the time; however, I didn’t see them every moment of the day so I have no idea what they were like in their private moments. Sometimes life knocks us down, sometimes a lot. We lose people we love. We see injustice we have no power to change. We learn of the millions of people being trafficked with little to no interference. Governments value power above their people. Despite copious education about the dangers of drugs, people overdose every day; many don’t survive. The list goes on and on.

Grief, hurt, anger, sadness, etc., have been turned into demons that must be squashed and conquered. Because we feel these things we are trained to believe we’re wrong and even evil; sinners for feeling anything put positive. Does anyone else see what we’ve done? We’ve made normal feelings sins like we didn’t have enough on our plate with real sins like lying, cheating, coveting, lusting, etc.

God grieves. God gets angry. I’ve read the Bible; it’s all there. Instead of trying to cut out those pesky, inconvenient emotions, perhaps we ought to work at learning to master them as God masters His. Don’t know where to start such a transformation? Search for scripture verses. Studying God’s word isn’t a popular self-help option. It wasn’t something I was taught. I was taught that if you have a question someone has probably written a book about it. Never was I warned that the person could very likely be wrong.

I embraced the advice to seek from every good book but failed to be discerning. Many authors are sincere in their efforts to share the good. Some truly are in it for the money and don’t believe what they write and believe their opinion is right, despite how it contradicts God’s word.

Changing my own perspective is a challenge but worth the battle. My life depends on it. For a long time now, I’ve been working to live a Christ-centered life. I confess, more times than not I’ve chosen to read what others write, outside the scriptures. I thought maybe they understood Jesus’ words better than I did. Too often, I failed to consider praying for inspiration to understand.

God didn’t plop us down here with no instructions and abandon us. He wants us to seek Him. He gave us the Bible. In it are the instructions to ask, seek, and knock.

Jesus didn’t abandon the negative people in His life. Compared to Him, that would be everyone. He didn’t even abandon Judas, who valued money more, until it was too late.

Now, before we rush out and embrace all the porcupines and bad actors, it needs to be remembered and banded on our minds that Jesus knew who He was and Whose He was. He had and maintained healthy boundaries.

So maybe instead of condemning the negative in our lives we need to see the purpose and learn to harness it and use it for good. Recognize that without sorrow we wouldn’t know happiness. Without rebellion, we wouldn’t know the power of surrender. Without anger, we wouldn’t know to value peace. This doesn’t mean seek out the negative; it will find us without any help from us. Instead of beating ourselves up when it enters our lives, we look at it, examine how we may learn from it, and thank God for the lessons to help us become more like Him.