Faith Venture

I just wrote about discontent. That seems to be the psychological condition of our time. Perhaps you suffer from that, too. At least occasionally.

Modern psychologists have researched emotions, conditions and responses. But ancient people had already figured out how we can respond to and conquer discontent. Brain science has merely confirmed what people knew back then – you can change the way you think, you can change the way you feel.

Paul shows us the way. He is always giving thanks. Our pastor used the phrase Sunday, “Gratitude leads to attitude.” As we focus on giving thanks for what we have, we establish in our minds the attitude of thankfulness instead of the attitude of neediness.

This is a great spiritual practice–to begin each day as part of your meditation to focus for a few minutes on all the blessings you have received. Then you’ll be prepared when you continue your day with the daily newspaper that tries to persuade you through editorial and advertising how much you need something else. Or television advertising, or magazines, or billboards, or every other way that marketers try to reach you with the message of discontent–if only you had this, you’d be satisfied.

Stop now and thank God.

This entry was posted on November 20, 2012 at 7:49 am and is filed under Disciplines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.