Christy Writes: Confronting the Negative

I was driving down the street yesterday and I passed an elderly woman in a floral housedress, wrestling a lawn mower down her steep concrete front steps. You have your heroes, I have mine.

The seminary is on fall break this week, and I’m so glad. It’s been a hectic semester so far, between taking a full course load and working as a pastor at a wonderful church in the Poconos.

Aside from being able to stay in my pajama pants all day, listen to Gothic Voices Radio on Pandora (which I’ve become oddly addicted to), drink coffee and get caught up on my studies, I’m also grateful to have time to think a bit, to separate myself from the happy chaos that is the main ingredient in my daily life, so that I can sort out a few things that have been clogging up my spirit lately.

In a nutshell, here’s my issue: What do you do with negative people?

There are so many different kinds out there, and sometimes it feels like they’re constantly circling around me. I’ve unfollowed and blocked so many people on Facebook because of the constant political bickering that my friends list is down to pretty much just me and the three people I know who opened accounts eight years ago and haven’t been on since.

But social media and political negativity aren’t even the biggest problems. I’m finding myself having to deal with negativity on a regular basis, and it is getting exhausting. Pessimists, gossips, people who seem to take a genuine delight in looking for weakness or problems in others, and dragging them out for all to see.

The worst part for me is that I recently started falling into their behaviors myself. One day last week I was in a terrible mood, and for no reason that I could figure out. I snapped at a few people, and worse, I found myself talking negatively about others.

When I got home that night, I was exhausted and miserable. I felt around for something to blame – fall allergies, the rain, we’re out of coffee, the neighbors’ dogs are too loud – when I suddenly realized there was nothing wrong except that I had let myself get swept up into all the negativity that had been around me all day.

That realization stopped me right in my tracks.

I consider myself a positive person, and as clergy in training, part of my job is to set a good example, to do unto others as I would have done unto me, and to love. To structure my life around love, and to live it in love and service to others. I’ve adopted as the guiding verse of my ministry the words of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 16:14 … “Let all that you do be done in love.”

And yet that’s not what I had been doing. By letting myself fall prey to others’ negativity, I was not living in love. I wasn’t doing anything in love. All I was doing was complaining about everything to either my mother, The Guy or The Rev, and probably dragging them down in the process. What an ugly, vicious cycle.

Yesterday afternoon, I went to visit an elderly friend who has been sick at home for the past couple of weeks. For nearly three hours, we sat together, held hands, and talked. And just being there with her, hearing her stories, and knowing that despite all she has lived through, she feels happy and blessed, blew through me like a spring breeze and made me realize just how little the negative things actually matter.

It was then that I decided to spend this week focusing inward, and trying to get my own spirit back into balance.

We are all humans, being humans. I recognize that. Negativity is going to creep in no matter what we do, because some days, stuff just sucks. And if part of my job as a pastor and a Christian is to love and nurture others, I can’t slam the door in the faces of those who are caught up in their own tsunami of negativity. Too many people feel abandoned or hurt by the church as it is.

But where is the line? Where is the line between loving others and protecting myself? That’s what I’m spending this week meditating and praying on, while I fill up page after page of my journal, and listen for answers in the silence.

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