Sunday, July 17, 2005

Your Daily Dose of Good Cheer

After finally going to bed at a decent hour (yeah!), I had loads of sleep and woke up before the sun. It's rare that we actually have HOURS to enjoy a quiet time and coffee and morning routine before getting ready for church.

Now, if your family is anything like mine, Sunday mornings are probably the least likely day to find everyone smiling and cheerfully getting ready to head out the door. We're usually running into each other in the bathroom, frantically pulling out the iron, and grumpily foregoing breakfast in order to speed to church, just in time to be late for the worship service.

But thankfully I was in a better state of mind this morning to meditate on this Proverb...

"A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person's strength."
~ Proverbs 17:22

I've read this a hundred times, at least. And in the Bible I carried in college, my friend Ginger Conner's name is written in the margin next to this verse. She is what I aspire to be. No inturruption or inconvenience has ever set her off-course from being positively cheerful to everyone around her.

In the study notes included in my Life Application Bible, I found a few helpful hints:

"To be cheerful is to be ready to greet others with a welcome, a word of encouragement, an enthusiasm for the task at hand, and a positive outlook on the future. Such people are as welcome as pain-relieving medicine."

There is likely someone you will encounter today who could use a cheerful word of encouragement. Go for it!

1 comment:

Hollie Carson said...

Yesterday, getting lost going to a friends house, I lost all of my cheerfulness. :( I need to think of Ginger n times like that. Hugh and I both don't do well when we ourselves are driving and getting lost. However, if I'm the passenger, then I'm a different person. When I get lost, I get frustrated and then I feel like crying. lol! I didn't cry, but could have. So, this is an area that I'm going to work on being cheerful in.