How many times have we heard others even ourselves complain about life? So many times I have had to stop and think about the “negative thinking” that we choose for ourselves daily. I agree there are a lot of challenges in life but how do we respond to the challenges. Do we wallow in them and declare “poor me” or do we bless ourselves and say “I am bigger than these challenges through Christ Jesus”.

We block our own blessings by choosing to “revel” in our sorrow instead of attacking the problem, praying about it and moving forward in faith.

I would like to provoke our thinking a little. If we were to look around and assess two families, one that is presumably “well off” and the other is so called “poor”.  Better yet, let me not use money but let me use appearances. So one family seems put together and the other seems to be in disarray; we dig a little deeper and look at the first, second and third generation of these families. Both families started off equally at the same level. The presumably happier family’s first generation did not have riches but someone must have said we have to stop thinking poor and in so doing blessed their lives and received God’s blessings. By virtue of this decision the second and third generation were also blessed. The other family that appears to be in disarray, when we checked their lineage, we found out that instead of choosing to see the brighter side of life they continued the negative thinking trend. No one spoke out but instead they all felt that life was just hard and that was their destiny; even though the blessing was already provided just waiting for them to open up to it, they missed the mark.

I say that to suggest that we look at our lives to see if we need to break a cycle of negative thinking and choose to not continue in this mode. It is really up to us.

I think about our children and I realise that we need to be careful of the kind of harvest/blessings that we speak over their lives. Sometimes we say things not realizing how we are impacting their future (embedding an acceptance of this negative blessing) . The saying that children live what they learn is so true because a lot of us had negative harvests spoken over our lives and we unknowingly continued this unfortunate trend; but guess what, we can break the cycle. We can intentionally change our future and the future of our children and the generation to come, by starting to bless ourselves and believe and accept that God has already blessed us.

I think the problem is that we do not understand that God has already blessed us and has already laid the foundation for a good life for us. If we did we would not worry as much about our lives and instead open ourselves to his blessings and not block the blessings.

Affirm: I will not block my blessings by giving into the negatives around me but instead I will open myself up to God’s blessings. So I will bless myself, my children and those I impact daily. It is well and I am well.