During one of her physical therapy visits in this sticky-hot summer weather of central Georgia, my wife entered a home without air conditioning. The patient, an older woman, was relaxing on the sofa as Christmas music played in the background.
“Did it work?” I asked. “She said it did, but I couldn’t tell the difference,” my wife replied.
How much control our minds have over physical matters is open to debate. But there is no argument that life deals us both the good and the bad.
Or as Jesus put it: The sun rises on the evil and the good, and the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous. (Sounds like that includes us all.)
Of course, the good and the bad of life are not evenly distributed. The late comic Christian Grady Nutt used to say: “Maturity is learning to play the hand you are dealt.”
I am often amazed at those who display a positive attitude through even the most challenging experiences of life. On the hand, there are those who (as one friend described someone recently) “can find a cloud in every silver lining.”
There is no easy answer to finding the “right attitude” even though we’ve been told to do so all of lives. But part of the answer lies in an awareness of what aspects of our lives we control and which ones we do not.
Today’s forecast is for hot, humid weather, again. And the to-do list calls for mowing the lawn.
Wonder if either of my daughters would loan me her iPod. I’ll pay the 99¢ to download the barking dogs singing “Jingle Bells.”
Director of the Jesus Worldview Initiative at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee and former executive editor and publisher at Good Faith Media.