I was sitting in a church service this morning in which the preacher was preaching the standard first week of December sermon: Mary and Joseph being told by angels that they will have a baby before they’ve even been married.  My attitude suffered. Why can’t we learn something new? It’s very tempting to think that I have nothing new to learn from the traditional December sermons. But the great nature of God’s word is that it never gets old. There is always a lesson.  

   Fast forward to Mary’s reaction to this news: Be it unto me as you say.  What an attitude! Whatever you say, God, is okay with me. Wow! She was going to look like she had relations with another person and risk losing her betrothed. But she said okay.

   Attitude is simply this: a decision. It’s a decision to work with what we’ve got. It’s a decision to be happy with what we’ve got. It’s a decision to look with hope to our future. 

    Have we become a society of bad attitudes? We complain about our day, we’re mad at our leaders, and we declare our possessions not good enough within months of buying them. The Internet is full of our attitudes, and very few are good.

    How can we change the habitual attitude of ingratitude?  We simply choose to see the good in any situation. A good attitude comes from a decision to be happy or be content.

    Okay… admittedly, that’s advice for the typical human being.  What do we do for gifted kids?  Gifted kids are eternal optimists in elementary school, but it doesn;t take long to turn them into true cynics!  How do we convince our smartest kids not to give up on the world?  Not to have a rotten attitude?  

    I don’t have that answer for you.  The most I have is what I try to do.  I try to get the kids to look at a smaller picture (as opposed to the “big picture”).  When they look at the entirety of an issue, it’s very easy to become overwhelmed and give up.  If they look at just their corner of the world, they start to see evidence of improvement, and this breeds hope of more improvement.  Isn’t it funny that we spend so much of our time with youth trying to get them to see the big picture, but with gifted youth, we try to give them tunnel vision?!  The problem for them is that they have been seeing the big picture all along.  They do not understand why others don’t.  It all seems so easily fixed, and the world just won’t listen.  While I am not an advocate of making your gifted child into an elitist, I do believe it is important that your child understand that he/she does not think like most people… that he/she is capable of so much more than the average person.  The way to keep him humble is to remind him that he is abnormal because of this ability, and he cannot be mad at people for being normal.  The abnormal just have to help them see the big picture when the time is right.  

    I have found that this helps even my kids who spend the most time depressed to see hope.  It’s not a fix, but it surely is a choice of a better attitude about things.  

    Let’s face it, a good attitude is not, all on its own, get you that dream job or perfect mate.  It will, however, make more people want to be around you.  It will cause better health - several studies have proven this.  And it will increase the number of good ideas and experiences that come into existence simply because their originators had a good mental attitude.  There’s no downside to a good attitude!

• Michelle