Tag: attitude

The Elephant in the Room on Sunday Mornings

I’ve always hated the following way some preachers (and other public speakers) begin a talk:

Preacher: Good morning!

Congregation (weakly): Morning.

Preacher: Oh, let’s try that again. You can do better than that! Good morning!

Congregation (stronger): Good morning!

After being thoroughly chastised for not being excited enough, the audience repeats the greeting a little louder.

I guess what bothers me is the implication that we all need to be cheery and excited and full of faith and ready to conquer the world.

Frankly, that’s just not the case for many of us in the room. In fact, it may be the opposite. It may be that being at the end of our rope is what brought us here to church in the first place.

I’ve always felt that our churches need to acknowledge the hurt in the room on a given Sunday morning. After experiencing three deaths of my loved ones in the past four years I believe it even more.

Mom & Dad, 1995 (our wedding)

And as Mother’s Day approaches and I remember my mom’s 10-year descent into Alzheimer’s and all that entailed…as I recall her death and having to tell Dad…as I look at her photos and remember her as she was before that evil disease hijacked her brain and body…I feel this pain even more and feel strongly that churches should address the pain in their midst. Mother’s Day is not just about honoring the moms in the room but should also be about acknowledging the pain in the room from all the missing moms.

Almost half of the Psalms are songs of lament—expressing our pain and suffering back to the Lord without sugarcoating it. Henry David Thoreau said it well: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Can we not acknowledge this better in our services?

Keith and Kristyn Getty explain their approach to leading worship with these thoughts in mind:

We sing, as the Psalms train us, to help us bring all of our lives, failures, successes, losses, gains, dreams, and ambitions into gospel perspective. Our singing can prepare us for every season of life, and sustain us through every season of life. We don’t need a musical escape from our lives; we need to gaze on the Savior of our lives—our refuge and help and comfort.

(From Sing!: How Worship Transforms Your Life, Family, and Church by Keith and Kristyn Getty, p. 47.)

What do you think? Should our churches do a better job of acknowledging the pain in the room? And if yes, how so?

Update: After I wrote this post, I came across this from Facts & Trends on how churches should handle Mother’s Day.

Wowsie wowsie woo woo: How attitude changes everything

Schleprock
Bad Luck Schleprock

I remember a short-lived cartoon from when I was about nine or ten years old called The Pebbles and Bam-Bam Show. It focused on the Flinstones’ and the Rubbles’ kids in their teenage years. Sally Struthers (Gloria on All in the Family) and Jay North (Dennis the Menace) voiced the title characters. But the character that stands out the most was Bad Luck Schleprock (voiced by Don Messick, who was also behind the similar voice of Droopy the Dog and hundreds of other cartoon characters from my youth).

Schleprock’s signature line was, “Oh wowsie wowsie woo woo. Miserable day, isn’t it?” He seemed to live under a perpetual dark cloud and brought bad luck with him wherever he went. You could say he was the death of the party due to his poor attitude.

The word “attitude” has gotten a bad rap in recent years. It’s often come to mean that someone has given us some lip or has been seen as too haughty. As in, “Don’t give me that attitude!”

Or we tend to think of attitude as something that happens to us. As if we have no control over it. It’s like a cloud that settles over us and we have no way to get out from under it. Wowsie wowsie woo woo.

But many times we have much more control over our attitude than we realize. And it’s the successful person who has figured out how to maximize a positive attitude in order to move forward.

At no time is this more important than when we fail. When we stumble, it is so easy to fall into a pit of despair and failure, wallowing in a negative attitude that colors the rest of our day. We find ourselves under a cloud. And it seems to move with us.

Even the word “fail” has such negative baggage with it, and is so close to the word “failure.” No one wants to be a failure, but it’s easy to go from “I’ve failed” to “I’m a failure.”

What if, instead, we looked at failures as opportunities to learn? What if, instead of beating ourselves up, we did some deep thinking about how we can grow from the experience and be better the next time? What if, instead of feeling defeated, we took an honest appraisal of what went well and what we can improve on, and looked with a positive attitude to how we can be even better?

We have the power to walk out from under that dark cloud and create a new reality. And it all starts with attitude.

Beautiful day, isn’t it?