With Weeks Of Staying At Home, What Has Worked For You?
During the “stay at home” social media was abuzz with how we should handle it: find a skill vs read a book, use a mask vs create the herd, stay at home versus go to work, homeschool versus “distance learning”, “First World problems” to “starving in a third world country…” Perpectives ran the full gambit from humorous to hateful. Let’s pause for a moment and reflect on a perspective that has resonated during 2020. With so many stories bombarding our newsfeeds. How do we respond to this yo-yo of survival versus shattering struggles, of hope versus helplessness, of community cooperation versus cancel culture. How do we seek to learn from this global experience to make the world around us better. As we each process our own different internal reactions to these “new normals”, may we consider our 90%, may it be life-changing, and may we seek to live at peace within our community.
“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company…a church….a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past…we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude…I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you…we are in charge of our attitudes.”
― Charles Swindoll from The Great Awakening
No matter what is going on in life, let’s choose to have a good attitude. Is that choice always going to be easy or even be the first reaction? No, but by striving to have a good attitude life will look much different. Maybe there is spilled coffee, sleep deprivation from late night zooms, trips to the stores without toilet paper or cleaning supplies, but maybe that is the perfect opportunity to laugh at the crazy, change our reactions, encourage those around us, and impact our community for the better.
What attitude will you choose today?
