So this week as I was feeling rather energized and excited to meet the day I decided to write sticky note notes for my co-workers sort of as a thank you and sort of as an affirmation. I then did my best to deliver them when their cubicles were empty (now don't think that I just gave away to the world my anonymous good deed, they can totally tell my handwriting. It wasn't about being anonymous, it was about being grateful and positive). So I had delivered the notes and was doing my best to focus on some tasks I needed to finish when a co-worker came over to me and told me I was being too happy and denied a bit of what I had written in the note. Now I realized that he was mostly joking when he said that I was being too happy and that him denying what I wrote said way more about his mental space than mine.
It was then I realized a bit more about the world we live in, I wouldn't have thought there was such a thing as being too happy, but apparently we as a world are focusing in too much about needing to be focused on goals to the exclusion of all else. We need to be grim faced and only see the negative. I can't say that I blame people for feeling that way, it seems where ever we turn we see sad news online, on the news and people only seeing the bad. It can be hard to believe that there is good in the world, but what if we made it a goal to choose everyday to say something good, to share a blessing or tender mercy we received and to say the words " I am so glad" or "I am so grateful". I feel like we count our importance these days by sharing how many things are going wrong or how many deadlines are falling through. Now I'm not saying that we can't share our burdens with others, in fact I think if more people were sharing what was actually going on in their lives we would live in a world where we had more compassion for others because we all realized that we all have things. At the same time in a world of negative expectations think of how much more vulnerable it is to say what we are grateful for or to share something new we have learned.
This week I had a friend say to me that it sounded like I have been reading self-help books and it made me sad that it was almost said in a negative tone of voice, as if it is bad to want to improve yourself, bad to want to learn how to process heavy emotions in a more effective way or to want to be in a better head space to help others.
We live in a world that seems to think that being negative is the order of the day, that struggling is just part of the deal and that the more we speak negatively about situations the cooler we are. So what if we started a revolution. What if we got genuinely excited about things, what if we spoke with happiness in our voices and we even smiled a time or two. I know that life can feel heavy, that it isn't all puppies and roses. We can and should share the ouches, but do we share them seeking for support, hope and solutions or do we share them in anger and disgust? I just realized that Satan lies to us, he says that if something is going wrong or isn't going quite the way we had hoped then we need to be in the depths of despair or at least we can't feel two emotions at once. We can be sad or disappointed that things aren't going quite the way we had hoped and we can feel gratitude for good things, be excited for others' successes and generally be cheerful. We are complex human beings we can feel more than one thing at once.
This life is full of enough struggles and enough clouds, I hope that this week we can each bring a little sunshine, even in the middle of our own storms, we all need a little sunlight and just think what could happen if we all brought a little sunshine to the table, we could light up the whole room. I hope this week even in the midst of all that is happening we can each choose to see a little good, to celebrate a success no matter how small and that the nurture our hope in Christ to grow so that we can each bring sunshine to another who could feel surrounded by clouds.
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