When he climbs into his pulpit on Sundays, Bowen shouts \u2018God is good!\u2019 and the people shout back, in unison, \u2018All the time!\u2019<\/p>\n
Will Bowen takes \u201cuncomplaining\u201d to an extreme. Bowen doesn\u2019t gripe about anything, ever. A reporter asks, \u201cHow are you doing?\u201d \u201cGreat!\u201d he answers. \u201cCan\u2019t complain.\u201d Really? You can\u2019t complain? What do you do when your car breaks down? \u201cI call the mechanic and ask him to fix my car.\u201d How about when something terrible and unfair happens for no reason? Everything happens for a reason, Bowen responds. \u201cAbsolutely. In my theology, that\u2019s what I believe.\u201d When he climbs into the pulpit of his church in Kansas City, Mo., each Sunday, he shouts, \u201cGod is good!\u201d and the congregation shouts back, \u201cAll the time!\u201d<\/p>\n
Complaining has become such an automatic response to life\u2019s little setbacks that people don\u2019t even realize they\u2019re doing it, Bowen says. Eighteen months ago, he was preaching a sermon on prosperity and was inspired to give a purple rubber bracelet to each person in his 280-member congregation. The bracelet, which says SPIRIT, was to remind people of the hazards of complaining. Negative talk produces negative thoughts; negative thoughts produce negative results, says Bowen. To live a happy and prosperous life, you have to stop complaining. To his flock, he submitted this challenge: stop complaining for 21 days. Put on the bracelet, and each time you hear yourself complain, switch the bracelet to the other wrist and start the clock over. It took Bowen three months to stop complaining; other churchgoers took much longer. Since that summer sermon, God has been very, very good to Will Bowen. Local news organizations picked up his story and Bowen wrote a book, now in its seventh printing. He went on the \u201cToday\u201d show and then on \u201cOprah.\u201d His church has mailed 5 million purple SPIRIT bracelets all over the world and continues to do so at a rate of 25,000 to 50,000 per week.<\/p>\n
Positive thinking is hardly new among American Christians \u2014 Norman Vincent Peale was a Protestant minister \u2014 but it\u2019s finding a newly receptive audience. Last month Kerry and Chris Shook, a husband-and-wife team who run The Woodlands, a megachurch near Houston, published their book \u201cOne Month to Live.\u201d The book doesn\u2019t advocate a complaint-free existence, exactly, but it offers a program to help people treasure each day. \u201cIf you live the next 30 days as if they were your last, you won\u2019t be wasting time, you won\u2019t be complaining, you won\u2019t be thinking, \u2018If only I had this, if only I had that\u2019,\u201d says Kerry. \u201cOne Month to Live\u201d climbed to No. 3 on the New York Times\u2019s self-help best-seller list, where it has stayed for the past two weeks.<\/p>\n
To those for whom complaining itself is a kind of religion, and who believe that efforts to sweep away negative thoughts with bracelets and 30-day programs are shallow and irritating, consider this: psychologists recommend similar tricks to their patients who need a walk on the bright side. \u201cIn cognitive behavioral therapy, there\u2019s a technique called \u2018thought stopping\u2019,\u201d in which a therapist helps a patient replace a negative thought with a positive one, says Susan Vaughan, a psychiatrist at Columbia University. Even in a case of an injustice, \u201cI would have you not complain because it won\u2019t actually help your mental health, it will make you feel worse, and people will react negatively to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Laura Schlessinger would disagree. In her new book, \u201cStop Whining, Start Living,\u201d Dr. Laura insists that a few things are worth complaining about: in those cases, complain, make it short and move on. Life is \u201ccrappy and unfair,\u201d but it\u2019s also full of blessings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When he climbs into his pulpit on Sundays, Bowen shouts \u2018God is good!\u2019 and the people shout back, in unison, \u2018All the time!\u2019 Will Bowen takes \u201cuncomplaining\u201d to an extreme. Bowen doesn\u2019t gripe about anything, ever. A reporter asks, \u201cHow are you doing?\u201d \u201cGreat!\u201d he answers. \u201cCan\u2019t complain.\u201d Really? You can\u2019t complain? What do you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1874,4582,2163,1019,280],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5170"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}