“Positivity is the key to success”
The words rang through our home numerous times each day, from a daughter to her brother throughout his adolescents.
They are good words, they are encouraging words … but they are not always the words one desires to hear when negative situations seems to falling into one’s lap, over and over, day after day.
The Bible allows for a little negativity:
- Job, quite literally, sat upon a dung heap numbering his woos
- the Psalmist has numerous accounts of laments
- Esau cried out loudly when his birthright was given to his brother
- heck, an entire book in the Old Testament is called Lamentations
It is okay to to lament, sit for awhile on a dung heap and to cry out to God.
Our God knows and sees all that we experience in this life. He knows when we hurt, when we are angry, when we ache. To not share our laments with him is pointless, for we cannot hide anything from him.
With our acknowledgement of the negatives in our lives, can come some relief, for in the telling, the sharing of our hearts in the safety of communion with God, it can be like a needle prick in a balloon, allowing the tension of holding it all in to be broken.
In sharing our honest hearts with God, we release our negative situation to him, no longer being held down by it’s control.
Though positivity can be a key to success, dealing rightly with the negatives is also an important factor. Holding on to the negatives in our lives, as if they were a precious jewel, does not allow us the freedom that comes from handing them over to God.
And he is safe with our laments, for “he was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain” (Isaiah 53:3).
itsawonderfilledlife 