We often hear about Satan corrupting something good so that it
becomes evil. The useful application of the desire to impress others is an example of using an evil desire to accomplish
something good. Then again, it's possible that the desire to impress
others was good to begin with, but corrupted, and now un-corrupted. It
makes me wonder how many other "evil" traits we have could be used for
good purposes. If pride can be turned toward self-improvement, could
some good also be made of feelings like anger or lust?
This
may be a dangerous puzzle to try and riddle out. If I try to think of
good things to do with negative emotions, I might end up with more
negativity in the long run. So far, my strategy has been to drive out
such negative feelings. However, that course of action would cause me to try and squelch my desire to impress others and instead to accept my faults honestly and openly. It may be the more genuine thing to do, but it won't get me any closer to achieving
my eternal goals. God gave us those feelings and emotions for a purpose. Satan may have twisted them, but I believe that we can still untwist them and realize the purpose God had planned. And since there are some negative feelings that I just
haven't been able to drive out anyway, perhaps it would be wise to try
to turn them toward something good.
On the other hand, I have to concede that the purpose God may have planned for a few of our emotions is to give us vices to overcome. I'm not sure how, or even if, anger could be turned into something positive. Lust can be un-corrupted, if you use your "interest" in another person to develop a genuine interest in who they are as a person. I suppose anger could be used to empower productive physical labor, but unless you're a blacksmith or a lumberjack, you may have a hard time finding something you can do for which aggressive actions would help.
I still think that some things can be un-corrupted, but it would take a lot of creativity to find out how. Maybe, if you have a problem with a particular vice, you could pray for guidance for how to use the vice to do good. It may be possible, or it may not be. But I say that if it's possible for pride to be used in a good way, it may be possible for other vices to be un-corrupted as well.
2 comments:
We need more words for pride. There is a difference between self-respect and arrogance. We should want to be, look, and do our best. We should always be striving to be good and become better. There is nothing wrong with putting our best face forward. Trying to present our best self is not necessarily the same as pretending to be something we are not. The question is why. To "impress" others? Why? To not disappoint, to become better, to reach for the ideal, to help others also try their best -those seem like good reasons. To get gain, to be "better" than someone else - not so much
I like recognizing that lust can be changed to interest in a person instead of a body. Unless the body in question is all that is presented. Then, RUN the other way.
When we experience negative feelings, we can try to find out why we have them and to change them to positive. As far as not being a blacksmith or a lumberjack, there's a meme going around Facebook about how clean the house gets when the person is angry. I have plenty of weeds that need ripped out, in fact, an entire "lawn" Good outlet for working off feelings.
Your last paragraph hits it with the mention of prayer. Always the answer.
Did you know that it is no longer enough to click "I am not a robot" in order to comment on your post? Now we have to play a matching game, too.
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