Positivity and Practicality

 Positivity and Practicality

My wife and I were talking about these two words yesterday. I think we often assume them to be contradictory. How could we be both positive and practical in the face of a cancer diagnosis for example?

I'm not a particularly positive or practical person, as my wife would testify, yet even I have heard that studies suggest that positive people are more likely to overcome cancer. There is genuine power in positive thinking, not to make everything okay, but to help us to overcome the negativity of life.

How can we be positive in the face of death for example? Ultimately, it's through Christ's defeat of death in His resurrection on the third day from His crucifixion on our behalf, to help us overcome all that's negative in our lives. He gives us something to be positive about.

A word on practicality: isn't it unrealistic to think that Christ overcame death? Nothing is impossible for God. More farfetched is the idea that something came from nothing.

If we believe everything came from nothing, and that all will be nothingness in the end, that's not particularly positive at all. Yet if we trust in Jesus to give us eternal life, we have a living hope. We can be positive, because God positively loves us and gave Himself for us.

I told my wife about a quote from the English civil war, hundreds of years ago, that encapsulates this talk of positivity and practicality. Oliver Cromwell told his troops (so the story goes), 'Trust God, and keep your [gun]powder dry'. Trusting God is the positivity, and keeping your metaphorical gunpowder dry as it were is the practicality (so that you can be 'firing on all cylinders'!).

To put it in other terms, we can be positive that God will help us to overcome all negativity, even disease, death and hell. Yet that doesn't mean to say we don't need to live healthily. Never mind spiritually, even physically we need to look after ourselves in diet and exercise etc.

Anyway, Joy and I would like to pray for you all that you have a positive and practical 2023, unless Christ returns first!

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