Attitude
“Your attitude should be the same as that of Jesus Christ.” Philippians 2:5
There is a story of a child psychologist that wanted to observe how different children respond to negative circumstances. They filled a room with horse manure and put a very pessimistic child in there. As they expected, he whined, cried and complained that he was in a room with smelly, stinky horse manure.
They put another little guy in there and he started tearing around the room, digging in the manure with excitement. This baffled the onlookers. They finally had to stop him so they could ask him what he was doing! He exclaimed with excitement, “with all this manure there has to be a horse in here somewhere!”
Like the two little boys, we can choose how we respond to negative circumstances as well. We choose our attitude. We choose what we set our minds on. We choose how we are going to think.
Psychologists will argue that once most people make that choice, they will then set out to find evidence to support it. Not surprisingly, they tend to only see what they are looking for. So it goes for us. If we choose to have a positive outlook, we can find blessings all around. However if we go into it with a negative mindset, we tend to see only the bad.
Take for instance the hummingbird and the vulture. Both the hummingbird and the vulture fly over the desert. All vultures see is rotting meat, because that is what they look for. They thrive on that diet. But hummingbirds ignore the smelly flesh of dead animals. Instead, they look for the colorful blossoms of desert plants. The vultures live on what was. They live on the past. They fill themselves with what is dead and gone. But hummingbirds live on what is. They seek new life. And they fill themselves with freshness and life.
The point is the same – each bird finds what it is looking for!
Which bird are you?