Attitude! Attitude! Attitude!

Life revolves around attitude. Ships sink - because of an attitude. The captain of the Titanic thought his ship was invincible and therefore did not sail with caution.

Ball games are won as much by attitude as they are by skill. Teams and business projects thrive or die - and all because of attitude.

Marriages are destroyed because of attitudes. Strong relationships are created by attitudes.

People are sometimes not hired because of an attitude. Jobs can also be lost because of bad attitudes.

People are made miserable by wrong attitudes or they climb to the pinnacles of achievement and happiness by having the right attitudes.

So, if attitude is so crucial to our well-being - why do so many people hang onto that which is destroying them? I don’t know. I’m just here to ask questions, not answer them! (Now, what kind of an attitude is that!!!)

Okay! Okay! So, why don’t we look for the answers together. I’ll flaunt my thoughts and theories and you can check them out and prove them or disprove them.

What is an attitude? I don’t know. I didn’t even ask Mr. Webster, but here’s what I think an attitude is: It’s simply ‘thoughts and emotions’ mixed together as a Jambalaya soup. But, it’s not just Today’s Soup Special - it’s a combination of all the soups we’ve ever had. Attitude is a ‘cumulative pattern’ of thoughts and feelings.

Our attitudes are affected by early childhood experiences. They are built on the foundation of early reactions to stress and distress. They are colored by the personalities and behavior of the people we have lived with. They are formed from bits and pieces of theology which has drifted down into our being over a period of time. Portions of our attitudes have been cloned from the attitudes of people we have run with, admired or hated.

I have had to avoid some people who are exceptionally condemning or judgmental, because no matter how much I hate their attitudes, I slowly become like them. How does that happen? Very easily. I take up for myself in a defensive reaction - if I’m the one being judged. If they attack others too strongly, I tend to side with the underdog who is not present to defend himself. In either case, I end up judging the ‘judgers’ and condemning the ‘condemners’ , no matter how lenient and tolerant I am of other weaknesses in people. That’s the first step toward developing my own wrong attitude of condemnation. That attitude ‘gets absorbed’ into our system no matter how much we hate it.

The only way I’ve ever been able to conquer those unwanted critical attitudes is to replace my original thought patterns with a willful choice of new, positive responses. But, one series of thoughts does not do the trick by itself. I have to choose that kind of thinking again and again. My good thoughts toward them have to be repeated until they become habitual. My attitude toward them mellows over time. Such choices build character. Character affects the direction of a person’s life. It influences their goals and alters their destiny.

Years ago I drove up to the Utopia School and walked toward a group of guys hanging around the back-end of a pick-up. Johnny Sinclair piped up, "Hey boys, here comes the preach. Hide your booze." I responded by saying, "You don’t have to hide anything from me. God sees everything you do - night and day - and you don’t hide it from Him. Do you think I’m greater than God?" Then I stood around and talked with them while they smoked, drank and let loose with a few words of profanity.

You see, I had learned that people are going to be who they are going to be and do what they want to do. My condemnation is not going to make them any better. It will just make them hide it when I am around. Does that solve anything? Not really. But, I couldn’t keep from condemning people who condemn others. I couldn’t see it at the time, but I was becoming more like them.

It is sometimes harder for a religious person to break an addiction to ‘attitudes of condemnation’ than it is for people to overcome addictions to lust, drink or drugs. That’s why there are so many people in our churches who have bad attitudes toward those they call ‘sinners’.

It’s not just attitudes about others that’s important, though. What we think of ourselves has a lot to do with the final outcome of our life. If our thoughts are tainted with doubt and smothered in fears - we become saturated with a lack of confidence. Our attitudes affect our decisions and influence those around us.

How others ‘perceive’ us makes a difference in how they ‘treat’ us. How they treat us, influences our reactions. Our automatic reactions become a part of our life and personality.

Even people that don’t know us, will get ‘vibes’ about us. We radiate a certain feeling wherever we go. Those subtle ‘vibes’ that we put off are coming from our basic personality - which is made up of combinations of attitudes.

You can meet a cocky, arrogant and egotistical person and quickly react to that attitude. It’s easy to spot a shy, retiring, person who seems to be afraid of their own shadow. Their attitude affects their demeanor. You will react differently to them than you do to a lively, outgoing personality. Yes, how we see ourselves will affect how others see us and how they respond to us. If we want people to react differently, we will have to go through some ‘attitude adjustments’ and that is not going to happen overnight.

Like I said, attitudes are thought patterns which are ingrained into our hide. They are interlaced with memories and emotions of the past. They are a spaghetti bowl of interwoven experiences and our reactions to those experiences. You don’t just decide to change an attitude today and wake up tomorrow with a new attitude. Nope. No, Siree. It just does not work that way.

Some experiences in life can cause radical attitude changes in us. But, only because they make us come to grips with our need for change. We then, make a decision to think differently or to feel differently about someone or something. But, when that person crosses our path, we have to re-affirm that decision and repeat our positive responses toward them. Only after we have made a habit of our new reaction does it become a new attitude. Even then, one mess-up on their part and it’s so easy to revert back to our original attitude.

For instance: We can decide to be more trusting. We can choose to believe what a person says. We can squelch our natural tendency to doubt them. We can shut out evil imaginations about what they might be doing or might have done. We can choose to accept them at face value and work toward building a good relationship, giving them the benefit of every doubt. But, the first time they disappoint us after we have believed in them and trusted them, our old skeptical, defensive attitude will jump to the surface and take control of our ship.

People who have a lifetime of wrong training will see-saw, up-and-down, between their past training and their new choices for the future. Only the repetitive reactions or decisions will win out over the old. But, too many people give up on the new because of such a struggle. It becomes easier to just go along with what they have always been. They think that they were born that way and that they will never change – so they give up. If it’s a religious conflict, they think they are being a hypocrite for not being 100% sold out to their new format for living. They don’t understand that ‘prior training’ is a powerful influence in our lives and is not easily overcome – no matter what anyone says.

It’s easy for those kind of people to think that everyone else in the church has it all together and they don’t. But, that’s not always the case. It’s just that the other struggling souls are keeping their failures quiet and their struggles under wraps. They don’t want anyone to know that they haven’t changed as quickly as was expected – so they hide it. It’s a common trait in the church world. That’s why there is such a ‘to-do’ about hypocrites in the church. If they would quietly struggle with their own sins it would be all right, but they often react to their own weaknesses by condemning others for not being perfect. It takes the spotlight off them. It’s that condemning attitude which is such a stumbling block to those who would normally want to join the struggle for change.

Once those religious attitudes get ingrained in a person, the ‘condemner’ sometimes becomes worse than the people they are trying to save.

Attitudes are attitudes. Those religious attitudes can be changed too, except that some of the people also have an ‘un-teachable attitude’. They have an attitude of, "I’m right and you are wrong." They won’t or don’t listen when someone tries to correct them. It’s that rigid, hard-nosed attitude which does the most damage and it’s almost impossible for those people to ever change. I didn’t say ‘impossible’, I said, "almost impossible".

For them, the change to becoming loving, forgiving, patient and tolerant is like going from the Sahara Desert to the peak of Mount Everest. They will never do it. They can’t – not without admitting to God how weak and wrong they are. But pride will seldom let them do that. They would rather tell Him how weak and wrong others are. They would rather point out the flaws of someone else than to humbly admit to a personal weakness or flaw. It’s simple pride, mixed with religious pride – a damning mixture to be sure.

But, as I point out their faults, I’m in danger of doing the same thing – right? So, you see, it is not an easy thing to hang onto only good attitudes of heart. Do you think I want to splash the garbage thoughts of my life out in front of everyone? Nope! Not at all.

I want to put my good foot forward. I want to put on my happy face. I want to ‘show off’ my greater talents and display the nicer pages of my knowledge. But the knowledge and memories of my own evil past are not so easy to display before all the world. It’s easier for me to talk about the ’bad in others’ and thus take the attention away from my own faults and failures.

Well, I didn’t intend to zero in on any special attitudes in this article. I was just going to point out some general principles and let everyone decide for themselves what kind of attitudes they need to work on. But, that which is on the inside comes bubbling out sometimes, whether we want it to or not.

Should I edit this thing and take all that stuff out. I do sometimes. My real thoughts erupt on paper and then I sort of ’clean up my act’ before it goes to press. Sometimes I worry about what others will think or how they will react. But, today, I’m just spitting it out.

I’m not intending to put anyone down. My aim is not to attack any certain group of people or any certain behavior. So, when I come on like that, I have to ‘repent’ and soften up the words a bit, so they will become more acceptable. I take out some of the lemon and add the sugar. And then, guess what, I worry about whether some will think I’m guilty of "sugar-coating my message".

So, I struggle to choose which attitude I should embrace. Should I ‘say it like I see it’ and let the chips fall where they may – or swing the ax wildly and scare everyone away? Should I throw truth at people in an abrasive manner or mix it with wisdom and gentle persuasion?

I started my religious life years ago with a ‘hell-fire and brimstone’ mentality. I climbed into the pulpit with a judgmental attitude mixed with a proud, arrogance of soul. Sincere? Yes. I was absolutely sincere. But, I was a punk preacher who didn’t know ‘nuthin’.

After living out in the world and getting to know the people on the other side of the fence, I came back rather subdued, broken and seeking to know and understand true meekness. I underwent some radical attitude changes and that’s how I know attitudes just don’t change over night. It took years of good input, practice and failure and more practice to flush the old thinking out of my system and adopt a new way of looking at life and people.

Do I need to make some more attitude changes? Sure! But, I’m tired and I don’t work at it as hard as I used to. I get a little complacent, thinking I’ve changed enough. But, I haven’t. There’s still room for lots of improvement in my life. Encouraging others to seek change keeps me trying, also.

I am going to change – just like everyone else does – little by little – whether it is for better or for worse.