Yeah, But What if You’re Wrong?

I’m not sure why it is that human beings have an absolute repulsion concerning the possibility of being wrong about something. Somewhere, somehow we have been schooled to believe that we must always be right, no matter the cost. What makes it more incredulous is the amount of years a person lives in an average life-span and within that relatively brief encounter feel in some way that they have mastered the game of living. It’s as if we’ve connected being right with our self-image and the potential of being wrong admits to a flaw in our character. With that I submit we are likely more wrong than we are right and being able to accept that introduces us to a whole new world of infinite possibilities.

What a person believes about their life is the life they end up living, right or wrong, limited or unlimited. A person’s life is literally the sum total of their prevailing beliefs. As you believe, so you live. If you expect much you live much. If you expect little or meager or survival, you live small, minimally or just barely. The grand irony being what you personally choose to believe is how you end up living. Assigning your life results to decisions made by a higher power or anything outside of yourself is a recipe for disaster. Maybe you are wrong…

Your beliefs and your life are the chicken and the egg conundrum. You think as the egg that your life simply plays out and that you must somehow finds ways to adapt to your ever similar circumstances and conditions. Yet, you fail to recognize that you are in fact the chicken and preceded the eggs. The circumstances you encounter with regularity are simply the natural outworking of the beliefs in which you are persisting. This is a system that cannot fail. Instead of spending your existence in futility fighting against causes you are engendering, you need to acknowledge the possibility that you may have some wrong beliefs. Your wrong beliefs aren’t difficult to spot. They appear infinitely multiplied in those areas where you struggle. If you feel that God is angry with you because of some persistent failing, then it is easy for you to also believe that your suffering is a direct result of your wrong doings. In essence, you have been talked into a wrong belief with a predictable result, suffering.

It therefore appears logical that instead of enduring life in the same blind alleys, you should perhaps entertain the notion that maybe you’ve got it wrong. The beauty of children is found in their open hearts. They know that they don’t know and in so knowing learn, grow and evolve, that is until the world gets to them and begins dictating the limits of their potential or what they can and cannot have. By the time they reach adulthood they have already been programmed for unhappiness by well meaning parents, teachers and adults. And sadly, the older they get, the more fixed they become in their belief system. But, that was not God’s intention for man. God already knows how people think and as such offered them learning outside their own abilities and reasonings with the intent that man would remain humble in his heart like a child and continue to grow and evolve. You don’t need to exhaust yourself in figuring out life, but rather expend your efforts in humility.

The question to ask yourself is what do you believe about life? How do you think life really works? Why are some people wildly successful and others abject failures? What do you think about God? Do you know who God is or are your beliefs based upon a hodgepodge of things people have told you or worse, well meaning ministers and preachers? Is it true that by always doing the right thing your life will work out well or do you know many sincere Christians struggling to meek out an existence? Conversely, how many rotten people do you know living the good life or so it appears? You see, something is wrong in those equations and in not knowing you are powerless to make any meaningful changes.

If I could sum life up, as ostentatious as that idea is, I would sum it up by saying that what you believe is the master key to living. God’s promises both vast and abundant can only be realized by believing. Living a healthy life free of diseases and maladies is more dependent upon what you believe than it is upon how much you exercise or how much red meat you don’t eat. Your finances and prosperity and resources have little to do with how good you are but more to do with what you can believe and expect for yourself. For some a $100,000 salary is a windfall, but for others an insult! No category of your life is exempt from this principle! You don’t so much need to learn how to be successful as you need to learn how to believe to be successful. You must learn how to change your beliefs!

Life with all its manifold beauty and wonder as well as its nightmares and miseries comes to you and is experienced by you in direct accordance with your beliefs. You are not powerless or without remedy. What you lack is understanding. Where you’ve missed the mark is in not knowing what and how to believe. Once you learn to believe and in many cases no longer believe, life opens up to you in a fantastic way. Instead of blaming circumstances and God and your upbringing, you now begin to take responsibility for your own life. You learn to see and recognize where your beliefs should be challenged and in challenging find new, better, true beliefs. In the end or hopefully much sooner, you will find God the author of this blessed existence, the answer to your heartfelt prayers, your only real source of life and blessing and enduring freedom from all that ever ailed you!

You might be wrong about life, but what if you are right?

Just some good thoughts…