Saturday, January 20, 2007

Time to toss the toxic

I’ll let you into a secret. Teenage girls are the biggest whingers in the world. Their tongues can be positively toxic. I ought to know – I was one once.

When I was fifteen I made a very momentous decision. It came from sitting around many meal tables at boarding school with my high school peers. I began to notice that the majority of our conversation was basically whingeing.

Whingeing can take many forms: complaining about injustices, feeling hard done by, recounting past annoyances, finding fault with food/friends/fashion victims, or just plain old vicious payouts of other people. We got a little bit of each into our conversation every meal.

I decided that the whingeing was getting me down, and I didn’t want to do it any more, so I would say only positive things. For a while, it made a difference, and turned our meal conversations around.

I remembered this the other day when I started listening to my words again. In recent weeks I’ve been whingeing. There’s really no other way to say it.

So it’s time to get back to speaking positives, making my words uplifting and finding the joy in the every day. Because there really is plenty of joy to be found!

How can I do this? In my own strength, I find it really hard. But, surprise surprise, God’s into that stuff, so he helps if you ask him, which I did, and he did!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello Cec,

I confess that I had a good whinge the other day... but I'm not a teenager anymore, I've finally turned 20!! So no excuse there.

It is a good reminder not to do it, especially in view of the many things we have to be thankful for, that we might over-look at times like those.

Looking forward to seeing you at MK camp!!

Kat Fitzy