Attitude

During the month of August, I seemed to have hit what I would call a very horrible emotional wall. Whereas summer is supposed to be a time of rest, relaxation, and “dialing it down”, I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated and discouraged. Someone recently asked me how I was doing. As I paused to think, she responded to my lack of immediate response with the words, “Uh Oh!” I informed her that after really thinking about her question, I had to admit that while my life was going rather well, I myself was not doing so well.

The next thing I did was to take a hard look at my attitude. It was then that I remembered the following quote, which I heard almost 30 years ago by Dr. Charles (Chuck) Swindoll:

“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations…The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, gifted ability, or skill. It will make or break a company, a church, a home.”

The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace from that day. We cannot change our past. We cannot change the fact that people will act in certain ways. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing that we can do is play on the one violin string that we have left after the other three strings have snapped, and that string is ATTITUDE. I am convinced that life is ten percent what happens to me and ninety percent how I react to it.

And so it is….We are in charge of our Attitudes.

I can’t say that I am “out of the woods” quite yet, but as one of my minister friends once said, “I have not arrived where I want to be but I’ve left where I was.”