Happiness is a choice

Who decides whether you shall be happy or unhappy? You do! You are just as happy as you make up your mind to be. I remember my mother singing this old church song early in the morning when she wakes up: "Sing to the mountains, sing to the seas, let your voices in your heart, this is the day that the Almighty Father has made, let all the earth rejoice!" This simple song lifts my spirit and starts my day right with a good choice, to be happy!

The habit of being happy is developed by practicing happy thinking. Start the day with happy thoughts and expect good things to happen to you. "A merry heart does good like a medicine"
says King Solomon in one of his proverbs. A famous psychologist says, "there is a deep tendency in human nature to become precisely like that which you habitually imagine yourself to be."

Let me share the following tips to you through this blog:

1. For the next 24 hours, deliberately speak hopefully about everything, about your job, about your health, about your future. Go out of your way to talk optimistically about everything. This will be difficult, for possibly it is your habit to talk pessimistically. From this negative habit, you must restrain yourself even if it requires an act of will.

2. You must feed your mind even as you feed your body, and 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 ll, verses 22, 23, 24. They will serve as samples of the verses you are to underscore and fix deeply in your consciousness.

3. 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 becoming a negative thinker than this will require. Effort and time will be needed to unlearn your negative pattern.

4. 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.

5. Avoid argument, but whenever a negative attitude is expressed, counter with a positive and optimistic opinion.

6. Pray a great deal and always let your prayer take the form of thanksgiving on the assumption that the Almighty is giving you great and wonderful things; for if you think He is, He surely is. The Almighty will not give you any greater blessing than you can believe in. He wants to give you great things, but even He cannot make you take anything greater than you are equipped by faith to receive. 'According to your faith, be it unto you.' (Matthew 9:29). Excerpts from "The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale

Make it always a habit to be happy.