Marcus Buckingham, who is a motivational speaker, loves to talk about 'maximising our strengths' and 'playing to our strengths'. He says that less than 2 out of 10 people get to play to their strengths at work.
After investigating the idea of strengths I realised what a negative world we live in. We always focus on the subjects that we hate and are terrible in and become mediocre in the ones that we are good at. In fact we don't even like to say that we are good at something.
For a while, I assumed that this way of thinking only really applied to our working lives.
Today it occurred to me, how much this applies to our spiritual lives.
I am not talking at this point about playing to our strengths in our spiritual lives... that comes later.
What I am speaking of here is our negativity... and our love of it.
When we first heard about God and about Jesus... we heard about Jesus dying and suffering for our sins.
How many of us, first heard about God's love for us? Even if we heard about it... maybe the focus was His dying and suffering.
How many of us, when we think about God, think about an angry old man, who is going to be quite displeased if we mess up?
When we think about living, how often do we focus on sin... and the fear of sinning, instead of good works?
In fact when we look at our own lives... how often do we measure ourselves in terms of our sins, faults and failures instead of our strengths, and inner beauty?
When a christian er 'falls'... how often does our impression of that person become based on their sin, forgetting all the God glorifying things that they have done?
Why is it that the people who have the most hope in the world are often the most negative?
While I do think that 'calling a spade a spade' is important... we often call a spade a backhoe and dig up the garden!
While is it important for a person to acknowledge their sin and repent, do we need to make those sins the most important thing about the person? Do we need to make our sins the most important thing about ourselves? Of course not, but we do!
On a good day most of us are fine... on a bad day however, where does our mind go? To all our mistakes and failures. To all that is wrong with us. To what we don't like about ourselves. To what we don't have and can't be.
Perhaps the words of the fake shrink in the MAD TV sketch drama is most appropriate now. 'STOP IT”
Maybe we need to make a conscious decision to use the backhoe to bury our negativity, and change our perspective on life.
When we sin, repent quickly and honestly with God. Maybe even with a trusted friend.
Ask Him to help us identify the problem that keeps leading us to this sin cycle.
Hold on tightly to Him... i.e develop our relationship with Him to a deeper level.
Make lifestyle changes to take us out of the path of unrighteousness.
Turn the sin on its ear and make it into something positive (stop stealing and give to the poor as Paul suggested; stop looking for love in all the wrong places and seek out ways to give love to those who desperately need it like the poor and those who have no hope.)
Realise that we are imperfect, but God still loves us... and forgive ourselves for our imperfection.
Live life abundantly.
N.B This was originally posted on my FB page as a note.
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