Find The Bright Spots

"Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up"  Romans 15:2

I recently read the story about Jerry Sternin who worked for the internationally organization called Save The Children.  The Vietnam government had invited Save The Children into their country to help deal with the striking problem of child malnutrition.  Sternin, traveling with his wife and ten year old son arrived in Vietnam not knowing a lick of Vietnamese.  They were met with the cold reality of universal poverty, poor sanitation, and very little clean drinking water.  The foreign minister told Sternin that he expected nothing from his program and if nothing changed within six months they were to leave.  All the experts kept cramming T.B.U. information (true but useless) his way.  Yes, there is universal poverty, poor sanitation, lack of drinking water, but Sternin went a different route.  He started looking for bright spots, and he found them.  He found children from some of the poorest families, were more healthy than children from some of the more well to do families.  Sternin started watching these mothers and recognized the bright spots.  Some of the mothers were picking up crabs and shrimps in the rice paddies while they worked in order to put them in the rice for dinner.  He also noticed they would feed the same amount of food the other mothers were using, but spread out the meals in four serving times rather than two.  The children who were eating large quantities of rice twice a day were unable to process that much in their digestive systems.  Sternin began to teach the other mothers by showing them how to make the meals this way.  After six months 65% of the children were better nourished and stayed that way.  Sternin's program reached 2.2 million people in 265 villages.

Looking back to our verse above, we are to build up our neighbors.  Edification is the same word for "building up".  We are not called to tear people down but to find the bright spots and invite them into even more light.  Over 17 different studies were done on how college students journal.  The results were staggering.  All of the studies concluded that the college students were obsessed with the negative things of their days and recorded them in their journals.  In an exhaustive study a psychologist analyzed 558 emotion words--every one that he could find in the English language--and found that 62% of them were negative verses 38% positive.  Others studies showed people who were shown photos of bad and good events spent much longer looking at the bad events.  Many novelists make their fame by writing about jacked up marriages, but there are no successful novels about a happy marriages.  In Phillipians 4:8 we are told to think on "whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."  Find the bright spots in the lives around you.  Find the bright spots in your spouses, children, co-workers, and friends.