FOR OR AGAINST??
Elizabeth Willis Barrett………………May 2021
The other day I was looking up a quote attributed to Mother Teresa. I wanted to make sure she is the one who had said it.
This is it: “I will never attend an anti-war rally. If you have a peace rally, invite me”.
She was focused on the positive. She didn’t want to be “anti” anything. She wanted to be “for” something.
One of the google hits took me to someone’s Facebook page where Mother Teresa was quoted. There were friendly responsive posts about this great woman. But sadly there were some despicable things said about her with some hateful name calling. I was astounded by the loathsome words used against a near saint who is known the world over for her acts of love and kindness.
What kind of lives do those evil responders live? Are they just scouring Social Media looking for anyone to ridicule and bring down with their hate?
If Mother Theresa can be disparaged, we’re all in trouble!
I would like to say to those people, “Tell us who you are for, not who you are against. And tell us what you are for, not what you are against.”
It’s pretty easy to announce what we’re against: a political party, a religion, a people. And we can find enormous amounts of information to back our negativity. We could sit at the Internet for an entire lifetime and only get up to take care of necessities, and we would never run out of ugliness to feed our cynicism on certain subjects.
We often look for the negative in individuals, too. There isn’t one of us who isn’t full of quirky, unpleasant qualities—some we’re working on and some we’re not even aware of. But most of us beat ourselves up enough for our lack of perfection. We don’t need friends or family or the internet beating us up, too. We would all hope that others could cut us some slack and be quick to point out our stellar attributes instead of our annoying ones.
Looking for the negative can’t bring joy—especially if it’s true that you attract what you think about.
So we should all do ourselves a favor and look for the good.
And, like Mother Teresa, be for instead of against.
