positivity..

A man and his girlfriend were married. It was a large gathering. All of their friends and family came to witness the lovely ceremony and partake of the festivities and celebration. Everyone had a wonderful time. And everyone could tell that the love they had for each other was true.

A few months later, the wife came to her husband with a proposal: “I read in a magazine, a while ago, about how we can strengthen our marriage, each of us will write a list of the things that we find a bit annoying with the other person. Then, we can talk about how we can fix them together and make our lives happier together.”

The husband agreed. So they retreated to two separate rooms and started making out their respective lists. And this absorbing task took then the rest of the day to accomplish.

The next morning, at the breakfast table, they decided they would share each other’s listed annoyances. “I’ll start,” offered the wife. She took out her list. It had many items on it, enough to fill three pages. As she started reading her list, she noticed that tears were starting to appear in her husband’s eyes.

She asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” the husband replied. “Please keep reading.”

The wife continued until she had read all three pages. Then she replaced her list neatly on the table and folded her hands on top of it. “Now, you read your list and then we’ll talk about the things on both of our lists,” she said with eager anticipation.

Quietly the husband said, “I don’t have anything on my list. I think that you are perfect the way you are. I don’t want you to change anything for me. You are lovely and wonderful and I wouldn’t want to try changing anything about you.”

The wife, touched by his honesty and the depth of his love for her and his acceptance of her, turned her head and wept.

In life, there are enough times when we are disappointed, depressed and annoyed. We don’t really have to go looking for them. We have a wonderful world that is full of beauty, light, and promise. Why waste time in this world looking for the bad, disappointing, or annoying when we can look around us and begin to notice wondrous things, perhaps even right under our very noses. I believe that we are happiest when we see and praise the good and try our best to forget the bad.

This material written by Trevor Klein inspires me a lot. But let me offer another suggestion.

Be a positive person. Seeking out the best instead of the worst, we could try to work on the bad until good comes out of it. We don’t just ignore them, deny they exist or simply forget them, and instead face them head on, learning lessons in the process and then turning the bad into good.

Be a positive person. There’s nothing you can gain by dwelling on the negative.

Maintain a healthy and happy disposition and find your strength in God. The joy of the Lord is my strength, as the Bible says. And one thing I can say is this…

It really works.