Choose Your Attitude!

This post is written to link with Five Minute Friday: write for five minutes on a one-word prompt. The prompt today is “your.”

This has been a difficult week for our nation – rising numbers of COVID cases, tightened lockdown restrictions once again, and, even worse, the very real prospect of a severe level of restrictions being in place for another six months.

It all feels out of control, and I know that many are fed up, frustrated, and full of fear about what the future holds.

What I have been constantly reminding myself of this week is: you can’t always choose your circumstances, but you can always choose your attitude.

There’s no denying the fact that the next six months are going to be hard, but I think the way we approach it will make all the difference. And despite the lack of choice about a lot of things, there are still choices I can make:

I can choose to enjoy and celebrate the freedoms I do have. This whole situation has definitely caused me to appreciate the little things much more than I did. And I can remind myself that severe as these restrictions are, they are not nearly as bad as what we dealt with for two months in the spring.

I can choose to take the view that in a sense we’re over halfway there. We’ve dealt with this for six months; surely we can do it for another six months.

I can choose to focus on others – looking for ways to encourage them and support them – instead of getting caught up in my own feelings.

And I can choose to look to God – to lift my eyes above this whole situation, to remember that he is still in control and he is bigger than this. I can choose to seek his perspective and look for what he is doing, trusting that he is at work and clinging to that hope.

“For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a gory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18 NLT)

You can’t always choose your circumstances, but you can always choose your attitude, and I think that choice will make all the difference.