AFTER going through the dead of winter, one can’t wait to bathe in the warmth and joy that the promise of spring brings to our life.
This is also the message of Easter for us Christians: a rebirth…a new life…in the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In reality, though, we experience so many winters in our lives at any time of the year or any season in our mortal existence. Winters steal away our hope and faith, that someday the sun will shine upon us.
These difficult times sometimes overwhelm us, and saturate our consciousness with hopelessness. They knock us down and make us forget the many times we have experienced deliverance in our lives.
When we succumb to desperation and look at our situation through a tunnel vision of doom, self- fulfilling prophecy of failure then becomes real in our life.
With the escalating problems of today’s world, it feels more difficult to fight against desperation, but it is not impossible. Such is the call and promise of Easter.
But the process of renewal and restoration has to start from within each and everyone of us — not from any extrinsic force we have no control of.
And as Napoleon Hill said, “What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
This Easter, let me share with you another important life lesson written by one of my favorite authors, Norman Vincent Peale.
In his book, The Power of Positive Thinking, he reminds us that inflow of new thoughts can remake us.
Peale said while Christians always aspire to do what they think is right, they must “go one step further and ask God to make us right inwardly.”
He said through real faith and a complete change of thoughts and personal habits, wrong thinking and wrong acting will be removed from our nature. When we are inwardly made right, then everything begins to go right for us.
Norman Vincent Peale outlined seven practical steps for changing our mental attitudes from negative to positive — for releasing creative new thoughts, and for shifting from error patterns to truth patterns:
1. For the next 24 hours, deliberately speak hopefully about everything: your job, your health and your future.
Go out of your way to talk optimistically about everything. This will be difficult, since it might be your habit to talk pessimistically. You must restrain yourself from this negative habit, even if it requires an act of will.
2. After speaking hopefully for 24-hours, continue the practice for one week, then you can be permitted to be “realistic” for a day or two.
You will discover that what you meant by “realistic” a week ago, was actually pessimistic. But what you now perceive to be “realistic” is something entirely different; it is the dawning of positive outlook.
When most people say they are being “realistic,” they delude themselves. They are simply being negative.
3. You must feed your mind, even as you feed your body. To make your mind healthy, you must feed it nourishing, wholesome thoughts. Therefore today, start to shift your mind from negative to positive thinking. Start at the beginning of the New Testament and underscore every sentence about faith. Continue doing this until you have marked every such passage in the four books: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Particularly note Mark 11, verses 22, 23, 24: “Have faith in God…Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”
They will serve as samples of the verses you are to underscore and fix deeply in your consciousness.
4. Then, commit the underscored passages to memory. Commit one each day until you can recite the entire list from memory. This will take time, but remember you have consumed much more time being a negative thinker than this will require. Effort and time will be needed to unlearn your negative pattern.
5. Make a list of your friends to determine who is the most positive thinker among them and deliberately cultivate his society.
Do NOT abandon your negative friends, but get closer to those with a positive point of view for a while, until you have absorbed their spirit. Then you can go back among your negative friends and give them your newly acquired thought pattern without taking on their negativism.
6. Avoid argument, but whenever a negative attitude is expressed, [offer a more positive perspective of looking at the situation without sounding preachy and self-righteous].
7. Pray a great deal and always let your prayer take the form of thanksgiving on the [faithful] assumption that God is giving you great and wonderful things — for if you think He is, He surely is.
“According to your faith, be it unto you.” (Matthew 9:29)
Norman Vincent Peale affirms that “the secret of a better and more successful life is to cast out those old, dead, unhealthy thoughts. Substitute [them with] new, vital and dynamic faith thoughts. You can depend upon it — an inflow of new thought will remake you and your life.”
Happy Easter!
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Gel Santos Relos is the anchor of TFC’s “Balitang America.” Views and opinions expressed by the author in this column are are solely those of the author and not of Asian Journal and ABS-CBN-TFC. For comments, go towww.TheFil-AmPerspective.com, https://www.facebook.com/Gel.Santos.Relos
