Daily Devotional: December 30th, 2019

E+R=0, THE CHRISTIAN EQUATION, EVENTS PART II

In Part I, we focused on defining events in our lives, let’s look at how we categorize events in our lives. I tend to categorize events into three categories, positive (+), negative (-), and neutral ( ). Each type of event you will experience many times throughout your life. Most will fall into the neutral section, these are your mundane tasks such as, eating, sleeping, personal hygiene routines, etc. The second most will fall into positive, things like seeing a friend, getting married, your baptism, etc. Lastly are the negative events in your life, those things like a death in the family, a flat tire on your way to work, getting sick, etc.

Think about the question:

• Why do we tend to focus on the negative events more than the positive ones?

As humans we tend to reflect on more of the negative events in our lives. Science has proven that we have what psychologists call a negative bias. Negative events and more over negative outcomes to those events have a greater impact on our brains than positive ones. As humans we tend to:

• Remember traumatic experience better than positive ones
• Recall insults better than praise
• React more strongly to negative stimuli
• Think about negative things more frequently than positive ones
• Respond more strongly to negative events than equally positive ones

The inherent bias/outlook we have towards these negative events leads us to focus more on the bad events in our lives and push us to actually over-exaggerate them when we go to recall the events and outcomes. This over-exaggeration can impact our whole equation in one simple way, impacting our outlook on future events and our overall perception of those events.

• So now that we understand that we have this inherent negative bias, how do we overcome it?
• What areas of our lives can the negative bias impact?

things to Try

1. Answer the question before each meal of “Where have you seen God today?”
2. Pray for guidance and understanding to avoid the negative bias over the next week.
3. Write down five events from your week that were positive events and explain why they were positive, pray to God and thank him for each one.
4. Write down five negative events form your week and explain why they were negative, pray to God about each one and give those to him, ask for forgiveness if needed.