When It Comes To Praise, We’re All Small Children.
In spite of our laziness and lack of direction, we do occasionally do some bit of kindness or good. We’d honestly like to do more, but we aren’t inclined to work up a sweat either! Some of you do something good so rarely that you can’t resist the urge to blow your own horn loudly, and tell everybody what a wonderful bit of properness you just did. If you aren’t guilty of this, ypou certainly knwo someone who is!
There is a small child in residence in every human, and that child desperately wants to be noticed and told how wonderful they are! They aren’t at all excited to be noticed and punished for whatever lack or evil they’ve evidenced though! Your inner child is still hungry to be noticed and praised by the teacher, by mom or dad, by someone, for God’s sake! If you think of human life in this way, it makes a lot more sense. It’s even sorta cute at times, until someone over does it. Likely you’ve been guilty of that a time or two yourself too.
You’d really wish there was someone paying good attention to the good things you do, so you’d get more love and approval. Naturally, there is. He’s called God. The bad news is this; He’s observing your crappy behavior, all your failure just as much. Sorry. If you’d understand that God isn’t evaluating you in the hopes of beating your butt when you die, you’d be a lot happier. He wants you to learn from life, and doing a weak or pathetic job because you’re lazy isn’t going to earn a gold star.
If you’d just surrender, and stop fighting the process, make the decision to exert more effort for the good of your fellow man, you be a lot better off. You’d also accumulate a lot more of the praise your inner child hungers for. Its pretty simple, if you’d care to bother thinking about it. All that disappointment and sadness you probably have is self inflicted. Here’s a crazy suggestion; Start by trying to be nice to someone, even go large and work to love another. You’ll get a lot more approval than you will sitting at home watching Springer on the TV, I can assure you of that!
Jack