Me:  Howdy!  Prodigal!

Prodigal:  How are you?

Me:  Just enjoying peace at this moment.

Prodigal:  I am a little down.

Me:  I can share with you ways to increase unhappiness or maybe you can just stay away from these.

Prodigal:  Well, it would not hurt to listen.

 

David Jeremiah shares this in his book Turning Toward Joy

 

If you are looking for a new way to be unhappy, perhaps one or two of these ideas will motivate you to greater depths of despair:

1.  Make little things bother you; don’t just let them, MAKE them.
2. Lose your perspective of things, and keep it lost.  Don’t put first things first.
3. Get yourself a good worry–one about which you cannot do anything but worry.
4. Be a perfectionist:  Condemn yourself and others for not achieving perfection.
5. Be right, always right, perfectly right all the time.  Be  the only one who is right and be rigid about your rightness.
6. Don’t trust or believe people, or accept them at anything but their worst and weakest.  Be suspicious.  Impute ulterior motives to them.
7. Always compare yourself unfavorably to others, which is the guarantee of instant misery.
8. Take personally, with a chip on your shoulder, everything that happens to you that you don’t like.
9. Don’t give yourself wholeheartedly or enthusiastically to anyone or to anything.
10. Make unhappiness the aim of your life, instead of bracing for life’s barbs through a “bitter with the sweet” philosophy.

Now if you have done all 10 of these before lunch then I say you have figure out the secret to unhappiness my friend.  The great thing though about follow our Lord Jesus Christ is that no matter if we have followed this list everyday for the past 30 years at any time God can change us and show us a way to have joy.  We can rejoice in knowing that in our stumbling and failings of imperfections God never says we have to stay there.

 

Hebrews 10:25

Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.

 

Jennifer Van Allen

www.theprodigalpig.com

www.faithincounseling.org