I Accentuate the Positive with a Song and Let Go of the Darkness

Daily writing prompt

What strategies do you use to cope with negative feelings?

View all responses

I never thought that I would actually hear myself say that well-worn Christian expression I had come to hate, “Devil, you are a liar!” I didn’t want to address any possible darkness and have it enter my mind or spirit. But in the last three weeks of having COVID-19 and then being admitted to the hospital for a bowel obstruction for the fourth time in five years and with my husband also sick, I started to question what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks was going on?

Suddenly, I thought negative thoughts, like the universe was punishing us for something huge. I questioned my goodness as a person, whether I had value and worth to anyone, and what I was doing wrong in my life that so much bad had entered it. As I lay in my hospital bed with the same top on for five days (because of two IVs that no one wanted to redo), I couldn’t stop thinking negatively.

Then, I remembered that I was the one who always looked at the positive side, searching for the silver lining in everything bad that happened. I started laughing at what I had said to the “devil” because I thought that as long as I was sitting in the pews at church, not really engaged in any ministry at the church, I was whole and healthy, walking two to four miles a day, going to teach and taking classes, and the world was fine and dandy. But two days after I preached a sermon on keeping hope alive in desperate times, COVID-19 came, and then the hospitalization.

I started singing songs that uplifted me, gospel songs and secular songs that brought me joy and reminded me to let go of the negative and accentuate the positive. I was alive, and the situation was not as bad as it could be when I considered the people in the Intensive Care Unit fighting for their lives and with families praying for miracles.

I know that sickness comes to believers and unbelievers and that none of us are immune to trials and tribulations that disrupt our routines. Those interruptions make us appreciate just how blessed we are when we are healthy and can live mundane and monotonous lives. So, when negative thoughts come, I think or speak something positive into the universe, finding ways to remind myself that suffering doesn’t speak to my value and worth, just as it doesn’t for others. And then I sing until the darkness is defeated and light shines in my heart again.