A doctor has three patients in three different rooms. In the first room, there is a 70-year-old grandmother with 12 grandchildren. In the second room, there is a 29-year-old women who has been married for a couple of years. And in the third room, there is the 16 year-old daughter of a baptist preacher.
The doctor walks into all three rooms and says, “Congratulations, you’re pregnant!” As a result, the grandmother has a heart attack, the 29-year-old newlywed screams with joy, and the 16-year-old shoots herself so she can do it before her father does.
The bottom line is that, in life, problems are only problems depending on the situation or your present level of understanding. Things are not absolutely negative or absolutely positive. How you see things all depends on what kind of glasses you are wearing.
If you study stress, you will find that over time, it will destroy your health. It raises blood pressure, increases cholesterol, causes blood sugar problems, and causes dysfunction of every cell and organ in the body. It has been found, however, that all stress does not hurt you. The interesting thing about stress is that the only time you are injured by stress is when you feel overpowered by it.
When the glasses you are looking through see that you are a victim of stress and that your problems are in control of your joy and success in life, that is the only time when the physical and mental damage of stress applies. Interesting, right? As famed philosopher and psychologist, William James, noted:
The greatest weapon we have against stress is the ability to choose one thought over another.
Consider a fun scenario:
It is the final inning of the final game in the World Series, and the score is tied. The bases are loaded, there are two outs, and the final batter now has three balls and two strikes. The next pitch will most likely decide the game and the series.
The final pitch is thrown, the batter does not swing, and the catcher is holding onto the ball. You can hear a pin drop in the sold-out stadium as everyone waits for the umpire to make the call. When he doesn’t say anything, the batter screams, “Well what is it?”
The umpire says, “It ain’t nothing until I call it.”
It isn’t stress until you call it stress, and the beautiful part is YOU get to call ‘em like you see ‘em, no one else has that authority over you!
At the beginning of the movie Patch Adams, Robin Williams is so miserable that he commits himself to a mental institution, telling them that he wants to kill himself. Eventually as the tension mounts, he starts acting funny and goofy and starts to see that joy and laughter have amazing healing power his jokes have on others, and himself.
Later in the movie, the girl who is the object of his affection tells him that he needs to take things more seriously. He replies, “No thanks, I already tried that, and it doesn’t work for me.”
He changed the prescription on his lenses, and now he sees things differently and better.
It is a depressing, dying, sick and suffering world we live in. Yet people continue to follow the same principles of lifestyle and health that their depressed, dying, sick and/or suffering friends, family and even professionals are following. If you keep looking at life through the same glasses you have been using, or those passed to you, even though the prescription isn’t working, I hope you can see that it’s almost impossible to “see” a way out!
The philosophy of health states that just like happiness, health and disease come not from the outside-in, but from the inside-out. God did not create you to be sick but to be well. If your body is functioning without interference, and you avoid drugs and surgery (interference), and do all the necessary things to restore and preserve the natural state in which the Lord created your body, you can get well and stay well.
This is looking at life through a totally new and different pair of glasses than you are used to. But at least you will stop running into old patterns or walking into the same mess you were before!
Blessed are those that were blind but now can see.
