Do you remember the gray cloud that
floated over the head of the cartoon character wherever he went? It
was Al Capp's scraggly character Joe Btfsplk. No matter where he
went, the bad luck cloud seemed to follow him.
The gray cloud brought bad luck
not only to himself, but to others who came in contact with him. Any
of us are in danger of becoming gray cloud people if we don't keep
our eyes focused on Jesus.
Another character in children's fiction
is Eeyore in the Winnie-the-Pooh books by A.A. Milne. He is generally
characterized as a pessimistic, gloomy, depressed, old gray stuffed
donkey who is a friend of the title character, Winnie-the-Pooh. Gray
cloud people are like Eeyore.
Particularly in the latter season of our lives we are vulnerable to depression and a pessimistic attitude If we aren't careful, we can even become attached to
that floating gray cloud. We actually become fond of it. It is as if the devil offered us a string
to tie to our gray cloud like a balloon and we deliberately
pull it along after us. We may find ourselves gradually taking a negative view of
everything and we'll be just like Eeyore. Even a pink ribbon on our tail will not be able to alter our attitude!
We start imagining the worst scenario. We invoke the
proverbial “Murphy's Law,” an adage or epigram that is
typically stated as: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Gray cloud folks maintain that if something bad can happen,
it is bound to happen to them. If that is a part of our customary
thought pattern, then it is a self-fulfilling attitude: The bad thing will happen!
Because older folks have lived more years, they have accumulated more things in their gray cloud. Their gray
cloud may contain an entire storehouse of things that other people did to
them for which they haven't forgiven them. The cloud becomes heavier
with the years. Each time they go into their memory cloud and reexamine
offenses against them, they reopen the wounds. They become as fresh and
raw as the day they happened. Gray cloud folks become bitter against
those who injured them. In fact, they may even have been fantasy
offenses. Real or imagined, their mental and physical health is
affected by those trips into their memory gray cloud. Certainly such
dredging up affects their spiritual lives.
If we keep looking in the rear-view
mirror of the past, it distorts our perspective. The gray cloud drops
gray rain on us until we are all gray, like Eeyore. We torture
ourselves with introspective questions: “Why did I make such poor
decisions in the past? Why couldn't I have done better? I have so
many regrets. My life is pointless.”
If we keep inflating our balloon-like gray cloud with such thoughts,
the gray cloud will become monstrous and completely obscure the sun. We won't be able to live in the present moment because of the cloud of leftovers from the past. And we will
contaminate everyone else around us with our negative attitudes.
If we see a gray cloud
starting to form above us, or if we are holding on to some gray cloud by a string
the devil provided, let's cut the string and let it float off like a
balloon.....
As it rises God will dissipate it. We'll find that
while we've been overshadowed by our gray cloud, all the while
the Son has been shining above!
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