Skip to main content

Seeing the Glass Half Full--and Filling It--With God's Help

If you see the glass as half empty, you are a pessimist.  If you see it as half full, you are an optimist.  If you learn to expect that God can help you fill your glass to overflowing, you are a synergist.

It's easy to be optimistic yet not achieve our success potential. God can help us become far better than we can become by ourselves; thus left to ourselves, we might see the glass as half full, but chances are that's all we will ever see--or be.

Are you the kind of person who thinks that God punishes you when you get angry, forget to serve others, don't say your prayers, fail to read your scriptures, etc.? A glass-half-full person doesn't think this way.  After all, the Zeus of Greek mythology that we often conjure up as our Heavenly Father does not even exist. The glass-half-full person notices the blessings that God gives to us every day. To see that he can't bless you fully unless you ask him for help, though, you become not only a glass-half-full person, but you'll begin to find over time not only that your glass is full more often than it is not. And your glass will grow larger and larger.  Thus you become a glass-to-overflowing person.

The scripture teaches that
There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated—  
And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.
Glass-half-empty people are too preoccupied with their own problems to see what's going on around them. Glass-half-full people see the blessings all around. Glass-to-overflowing people obey eternal law and expect to be blessed even more.  Simply asking God to help us accomplish what we're unable to do for ourselves, and expecting that help to come creates a synergy that makes our usually full glass grow even larger.

Comments

  1. I've always been a pessimist but I'm trying very hard to overcome that weakness. I'm blame it one that fact that I grew up in Boston.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thank you for commenting. If you have a Google/Blogger account, to be apprised of ongoing comment activity on this article, please click the "Subscribe" link below.

Popular posts from this blog

What's Your Reaction to California's Decision on Same-Sex Marriage?

Yesterday a "Republican-dominated" California Supreme Court struck down state laws against same-sex marriages. The LDS Church issued a press release, calling the decision "unfortunate". I agree, but not for reasons you might think. Did the California Court make the right decision? Update 5/17/2008 : California decision does not affect prohibitions against polygamy and marriage of close relatives. Why not? Government should not sanction same-sex marriages for the same reason that it should not sanction heterosexual adultery--such activities tend to be destructive to the family as the fundamental unit of society. Before you get too far into reading into my words, let me echo and agree with something that Madeleine Albright wrote in her recent book, The Mighty & The Almighty (one of the better books that I have read in a long time): I oppose discrimination against gays and lesbians and am convinced that heterosexual adultery is a greater danger to the institu...

The Inhumanity of Bob Lonsberry: Waterboarding, Concentration Camps, and the the Bataan Death March

KNRS 570 radio talk show host Bob Lonsberry advocated waterboarding and other forms of torture during his show on April 21, 2009. More grotesquely, he was beaming with pride about his advocacy campaign. It's difficult to imagine then, that, by the same rationale, had Lonsberry been a German at the time of Hitler, or a Japanese during the Bataan Death March, that he would not have advocated torture of Jews in the concentration camps or the bayoneting and shooting of American soldiers on the Bataan trail. Torture, Torture, Everywhere! Nearly 80,000 American soldiers were captured by the Japanese in the To contemplate a discussion about whether or not torture is legal or whether it even works, it is first required to come to the conclusion that 'I am a child of God, but my adversary is a monkey'. Phillipines in 1942 and forced to march with no food and very little water for six days. If a man stumbled, if he didn't respond quickly to a command, or if he tried to get wat...

One Sure Thing about Global Warming: Loss of Liberty

In all of my reading about man-made global warming, never once have I come across the statement that 'we are absolutely sure' that mankind is causing irreversible global warming by our behavior. No one has dared make this claim yet. The closest anyone has come is being pretty sure that something bad might happen in fifty to one hundred years if we don't act now. One thing that several people have stated (on both sides of the debate), however, is that slowing the supposed effects caused by man on the warming of the globe will require significant strengthening of governments around the world, along with a significant reduction in your freedom to choose. My religion teaches You may think, from this article, that I am having a hard time separating my views of church from my views of state. That would be correct. that there was a great war in heaven between two ideologies. The first faction advocated our Heavenly Father's plan, which was a blueprint for freedom of choice...