Michael Youssef - 15 Secrets to a Wonderful Life

Copyright 2008 Michael Youssef

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise noted, scripture is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION (NIV). Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture taken from The Message (MSG). Copyright 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

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First eBook Edition: March 2008

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ISBN: 978-0-446-51165-0

TO BILL AND SANDRA JOHNSON:

THANK YOU FOR YOUR PARTNERSHIP IN THE GOSPEL.

Any book, and this one is no exception, is the product of many peoples hard work. Several people deserve a special expression of thanks:

The congregation of The Church of The Apostles for their great encouragement in hearing and responding to the message of this book; Tricia Erickson, my research assistant, for patiently working on the manuscript; Jim Denney for organizing my thoughts better than I can; and, above all, Gary Terashita of FaithWords for believing that this book will be my best yet. I believe him!

Positive Thinkingor Positive Living?

O nce upon a time, there was an American corporation that earned over $100 billion in a single year. More than twenty thousand people were employed by this company, and thousands of retirees and wage earners had their life savings invested there. Fortune magazine named it Americas Most Innovative Company for six years in a row.

At the end of 2001, the world was stunned to learn that this company was a house of cards, propped up by fraudulent accounting schemes. The company filed for Chapter 11 protectionthen the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Thousands of employees lost their jobs and countless investors lost their retirement funds. Company stock, once valued at over ninety dollars a share, plummeted to as little as thirty cents a share.

That company was called Enron, and the head of the company was Kenneth Layone of the worlds leading proponents of positive thinking.

Mr. Lay rose from poverty to become a self-made millionaire. Along the way, he won the Horatio Alger Award, which was created by the leader of the positive-thinking movement, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. The Horatio Alger Award recognizes people who have gone from rags to riches through the power of positive thinking.

In May 2006, Ken Lay was convicted on ten felony corruption counts. Before his sentence could be imposed, he died of a heart attack.

Writing in the Washington Post (July 6, 2006, page D1), Steven Pearlstein concluded that much of the blame for the Enron disaster could be traced to Kenneth Lays excessive reliance on positive thinking. The remarkable rise and tragic fall of Ken Lay, Pearlstein wrote, is really a story about a man whose optimism was finally outrun by reality. Early on, he found he could succeed by putting the best face on things, stretching the truth, dismissing the doubts of naysayers. But in the end, those habits became his undoing.

How ironic! For more than fifty years, ever since Dr. Norman Vincent Peale published his 1952 best seller, The Power of Positive Thinking, weve been told that positive thinking is the key to success. Yet Ken Lays overreliance on positive thinking helped produce one of the worst failures in business history.

Is this possible? Could there actually be a dark side to the power of positive thinking?

Dr. Jimmie Holland, a psychiatrist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, warns against what she calls the tyranny of positive thinking. In her book The Human Side of Cancer, she describes how cancer patients sometimes come to her for counseling after being told by friends, Your negative attitude caused your cancer. Dr. Holland says that many of these people who are facing a life-or-death medical crisis are often made to feel guiltyas if they have caused their own disease!

Dr. Holland adds that its normal for cancer patients to feel sad, anxious, and worried. Its unrealistic to think a person can be positive all the timeand especially a person who is going through chemotherapy or radiation treatments. Yet, that is exactly what the positive attitude police often demand. Their blame the victim mentality shows how an overzealous focus on the power of positive thinking can sometimes produce a negative effect on human lives.

Please understand, Im not condemning cheerful, positive peoplefar from it. As followers of Jesus Christ, we have every reason to be joyful and optimistic. But we need to recognize there are limitations to the power of positive thinking. One of the biggest problems with positive thinking is that its difficult to maintain our optimism through times of intense trial. In tough times, we have to repeatedly psych ourselves up in order to maintain our positive attitude.

If you listen carefully to the preaching of the power of positive thinking, you discover that it requires.

constant self-motivation

constant self-elevation

constant self-affirmation.

It requires you to continually remind yourself, I can do this! I can achieve this! I! I! I!

What Im telling you here is not theory. This is what people actually say to themselves in an effort to maintain a positive attitude. I know. Ive tried the power of positive thinking myselfand I can tell you it may seem to work for a while, but it doesnt work over time. It doesnt work in all situations. There are limits to what positive thinking can achieve in your life.

When I tried to live by the power of positive thinking, I discovered that the very act of trying to remain positive can be exhausting and discouraging. I found that I needed a lot of mental and emotional energy to keep reminding myself throughout the day: Be positive! Be positive! Be positive! If I lost my positive focus, even for a moment, Id crash and burn. In time, I discovered it often took as small a thing as misplaced car keys or a nagging backache to make me lose my positive attitude.

Another limitation of positive thinking is that simple optimism isnt enough to sustain you when you hit a wall in life. You cannot elevate yourself over a truly devastating loss or an unsolvable crisis by reciting positive affirmations over and over again.

The positive-thinking gurus will urge you to repeat to yourself, Every day, in every way, Im getting better and better! That sounds wonderfuluntil the day comes when you realize your health is failing, your eyesight is fading, and your body is falling apart. Or: I love and appreciate myself just as I am. A nice thoughtif it werent for all the guilt, shame, and regret we carry around inside. Or: My life is blossoming in total perfection. What a beautiful sentimentuntil we stand at the graveside of a beloved spouse, child, or parent, and life doesnt seem so perfect anymore.

We are told to repeat to ourselves, Its okay for me to have everything I want or Infinite riches are now freely flowing into my life. But this kind of so-called positive thinking is really nothing more than selfishness mingled with wishfulness. Or: I am a radiant being, filled with light and love. This kind of positive thinking sounds dangerously close to self-deification. Or: I am vibrantly healthy and radiantly beautiful. But over time, our health declines and beauty fadesand such affirmations begin to sound dangerously self-delusional.