How to Stay Positive When Bad Things Happen

Learning to turn angst into joy

I hate shaving!

For me, shaving is not a matter of just running the razor over my chin once or twice.

No, I have to be sure to find every little hair and cut it off at the skin level. Otherwise, some of them, their ends sharpened by the razor, will curl back and penetrate my skin.

When that happens, that spot on my face becomes itchy and actually painful. So, I have to take the time to shave very closely, making sure every patch of skin is smooth. For me, shaving is a real trial, and I hate it!

Actually, that’s not quite true. For a long time in my life, I did hate shaving. But that’s not my attitude any longer. Now, when I shave, I refuse to think about how much the process irritates me. In fact, I’m learning to actually rejoice with every swipe of the razor!

How I learned to enjoy shaving

What’s changed? The closeness with which I must shave hasn’t changed, and I still must occasionally bear the pain of accidentally cutting into my skin with the razor blade. So, the sources of my former irritation haven’t changed at all.

What has changed is my attitude.

That change came about as I’ve begun to take seriously a passage in the Bible that speaks to how we can turn the negatives that inevitably happen in our lives into positives:

“My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” (James 1:2–4, NKJV).

For me, having to shave is definitely an unwanted negative in my life — in other words, it’s a trial. Not a big trial, of course — most of us can expect to face far worse regularly. Maybe that’s why James speaks of “when” we fall into “various” trials in our lives: not “if” but “when,” and not just a few, but a variety.

Bad things will happen in life

The truth is that life is full of trials of various kinds, and they seem to happen with depressing regularity. There’s simply no way to completely avoid them, no matter how intelligent or savvy in the ways of the world or even how spiritual we may be.

There will be those times when you get laid off from a job you loved, or that person you hoped to marry tells you it’s over, or maybe it’s just that the car won’t start on a cold morning when you’re already running late.

Many times our trials result from bad decisions we ourselves make. (I knew it wasn’t a good idea to go to that party where all my friends were packed together in a small room, and no one was bothering with a mask, but I went anyway. Now I’m scared that the reason I’m feeling so awful a few days later is that I may have picked up the COVID-19 virus). Or, as James indicates, I may simply “fall” into a difficult situation through no fault of my own.

But the lesson this passage has taught me is that whatever the source of my trial, no matter how challenging or painful or aggravating it may be, and even if I brought it upon myself by my own foolishness, I don’t have to let it drive me into a state of discouragement, depression, or despondency. Instead, I can choose to actually count it all joy!

The Greek word translated as “count” means to deem, consider, account, esteem, judge, suppose, think. That means I can decide how I will think about the events that come into my life.

I can make the choice to rejoice!

So, instead of thinking about (and talking about ad nauseam) how awful and depressing and unfair my situation is, I can choose to rejoice in it because God is using it to infuse godly patience into my character.

And as I allow patience to do its work in me, that painful experience I wish had never happened will be exactly what I need to help me become “perfect and complete, lacking nothing.”

So, believe it or not, I’m learning to rejoice in my shaving. Instead of continually lamenting how tedious and sometimes painful it is, I’ve begun to give God praise with every stroke.

After all, He has given me the privilege of shaving in a bathroom that’s nice and warm, even in the dead of winter. I don’t have to go out into the cold and snow to get a bucket of water, then build a fire to heat it up.

Instead, I can walk a few steps inside my house and turn on all the hot water I want. And the safety razors I use are so much better and more comfortable than what people had to shave within in former times. So, in reality, I’ve got a lot to rejoice about every time I shave!

I know that having to shave is pretty trivial as trials go. Most of us will have much more serious trials to contend with at many points in our lives. But, in terms of our attitudes toward them, a trial is a trial. If I learn to count it all joy when I deal with the trial of shaving, I’ll be much better prepared to count it all joy and let patience have her perfect work when the real trials come.