There is a beautiful parable in the writings of Luke (11:24-26) that
tells of an unclean spirit that is cast out of a man (the unclean spirit's home) by repentance and seeks a
new place to reside. The unclean spirit wanders through desert places and
finding no new home decides to return to his original home. When he arrives he finds
that the house has indeed been swept clean, but it is empty and so the evil
spirit invites seven other unclean spirits to join him and they all enter in
and dwell there so that the man ends up worse off than he was in the beginning.
The moral of the parable is that even though the man repented and swept his house clean, he
didn’t fill himself with something new and good so the old, evil spirit
easily returned.
The interesting thing about this is that modern psychological
research has shown that in the pursuit of happiness it doesn’t work to just
stop doing what is making you unhappy. To become a happy person a major break
with the status quo needs to happen. You need to not only stop doing the
negative things, you need to replace them with positive things.
Happiness is a choice! It takes work and effort, but everyone who
wants happiness can have it. The promise of the Good News! is that
man was created to experience joy! (See 2 Nephi 2:25.) and by choosing to occupy ourselves with good, positive things we crowd out the bad.
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1 comment:
I've experienced great success this year with replacing the bad with the good. It really does work in creating permanent change. :)
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