I recently taught a week long high school class on positive thinking. Here is a review sheet I gave my students:

Your beliefs will shape your life so believe great things about yourself and your future. Read a small amount from a self-help book every day and your positive beliefs will grow .

Remember the Magic Coloring Book lesson – where you choose to put your mental thumb will determine how you feel and how you perceive your day to day life. Think good things. Regularly resist negative thoughts. Start your personal collection of positive quotations.

Perhaps! It’s too soon to tell. Delay negative judgments about the things that happen in your life. The thing that seems to be bad today, may soon turn out to be good.

3 E’s of Encouragement: Event, Evaluation, Emotions. Your emotions don’t come from the things that happen to you. They are produced by your evaluations. Therefore evaluate in a positive way. Always ask yourself: “What’s good about this event?” Then find at least one good thing about it and focus your thinking on that good thing.

Find the humor and enjoy it. W.C. Fields said: “Everything is funny if it is happening to someone else.” Imagine that your problems are happening to someone else. Pretend Lucy (from I Love Lucy) is in your situation. Let Lucy live your losses.

Always act 10% better than you feel on a 1 to 10 scale. Smile, even when you don’t feel like it, and you will soon feel better. Associate with positive people / avoid self-destructive people.

Deepen your faith in and your relationship with God. Take this challenge: Read the New Testament for 21 days in a row for at least 5 minutes every day. Ask God to speak to you and then listen to and obey Him daily.

The words you speak are very powerful and will strongly influence your feelings and your behavior. Speak only positive words. Choose a positive affirmation and repeat it over and over and over in your mind.

Think good thoughts about yourself. Never put yourself down or call yourself negative names. Don’t compare yourself with other people. You are one of a kind. You are an incredible human being. You are a champion. Always believe that. How can you “love your neighbor as yourself” if you don’t like yourself? Frequently repeat these words in your mind: “I like myself.”

I like all eight of you who were in this class!!! Each of you is an amazing person and has a great future ahead of you. Work hard on your thinking and make your exciting future happen! Don’t fall for the tricks of negative thinking, self-destructive behavior, or bad attitudes. You deserve so much more than that! If I can ever help you feel free to e-mail me at stsimms@hotmail.com

All God’s best to you as you make yourself a wonderful life! Sincerely, Steve Simms

Motivation Quotation: “Impulse knocks like a salesman at the door. If one lets him in, he begins his sales talk about his wares; and it is hard to get rid of him, even if one observes that the wares are not good. Thus follows consent and finally the purchase, often against one’s own will.” –Tito Colliander

Motivational Sales Talk: Negative sales talks abound in our society — the strong, sometimes compulsive, pressure to obey our whims and engage in self-destructive behaviors. When impulse knocks on our mind’s door, our society has trained us to give him and his whims a warm welcome.

That, however, is a dangerous approach. Impulse is a very persuasive salesman and and paints what feel like irresistable pictures of his self-destructive products. Impulse makes many sales, even when we know his products are bad.

I spent three summers selling books door-to-door while I was in college and I got pretty good at it. However, there was one type of customer I could never sell — those who slammed the door in my face. (Ouch!)

If you listen to negative sales talks, you will be influenced. And you might soon wind up “behaving badly” – inflicting all sorts of unnecessary pain on yourself and on those who care about you.

The key: slam the door on impulse. Don’t listen to and act on whims and compulsions. Think for yourself. Use a little wisdom. Ask yourself: Is this behavior smart — will it make my life better or worse in the long term? If it will make your life worse; quickly slam the door! Don’t give impulse a chance to put his slick sales number on you!

Why do many nonbelievers like to use theological language in their day to day lives? Why do people who say they don’t believe in eternal punishiment for sin, tell people to “go to Hell”? Why do they use the expression “Hell no!” to let someone know that they are not interested in following their suggestion?

Why do people who say they don’t want their children exposed to prayer, use the phrase: “Oh my God”? Why do people who insist that they don’t believe in prayer, loudly ask God to “damn” things?

Why do people who say they don’t want to talk about God and spiritual things keep bringing them up in conversation? Isn’t there a major inconsistency here?

Sex is three-sided. Yet in our culture only one side of sex is promoted — physical pleasure. Sex, as promoted by our modern media, is all about selfish pleasure and nothing else. That is a rather shallow view of sex because it completely overlooks the other two sides.

Our society likes to deny the second side of sex, procreation. This denial is widely practiced through irresponsible sexual activity, womb killings, runaway fathers, and unwanted or abused children.

The third side of sex is seldom if ever mentioned. Even though it is the most pleasurable aspect of sex, many people don’t even know it exists. This is the heart-to-heart, emotional and spiritual intimacy.

The physical act of sex is like a door. It can open a pathway to an amazing, loving, compassionate, thrilling, trust-filled, dedicated, honorable, inspiring relationship. Sometimes people get a glimpse of this third side of sex and try to grasp it with the term “soul mate.”

Most people however can’t get their eyes off the door — the physical act of sex. They seldom, if ever, go through the door to the beautiful spiritual and emotional parts of sex.

The modern approach to sex is like someone going to a Walmart and playing with the door for hours. They step up and back away and make the Walmart door open and close. They see how close they can get to the door without making it open. Then they walk away and tell people they “got some great Walmart.”

The truth is that they didn’t get any Walmart at all. They never got beyond the door. Walmart is full of thousands of great things and those door-players missed them all and went away empty.

So many people today are missing out on the great aspect of sex. They have made it “casual,” “hooking up” in the door of superficiality with meaningless physical contortions. Meanwhile a treasure house of intimate blessings with another human beings is ignored and denied.

don’t believe in atheism. I don’t have the faith to believe in it. Nothing ever comes from nothing, so how could everything come from nothing?

Atheism is unrealistic. There is no possible way that our world and all its extremely complex life forms could come into existence by only time and chance, with no designer or intelligence behind them.

The presupposition that the amazing structure, intricate design, and highly complex life forms in the physical world, happened without a supernatural creator is an irrational assumption. The obvious fact is that anything as well designed as life on earth had to have intelligence behind it.

Atheism is narrow minded and domineering. It presents its unproven theories of the origin of the universe as “science,” and denounces any other viewpoints as “superstitious” or ”unintelligent.”

I don’t have the faith to believe that nothing produced everything. My common sense tells me that random actions can not produce amazingly designed, highly functional life forms. Not in a hundred billion years!