Recently, our dear Roxy, at
Living From Glory to Glory wrote a heartfelt post about those who rain on other people's parades, an expression that means "replacing the anticipation of joy with disappointment." Just think of a parade everyone is anticipating and waiting for, and it rains, spoiling the whole effect. Someone is happily occupied, or has achieved something, and a sourpuss tells them it is no good.
Gathering Flowers, by Daniel Ridgeway Knight.
Even the artists got terrible reviews from people whose job it was to be critics.
The spoilers, the cynics, the the sour and the suspicious, have been around since the beginning of time. You can find them in the Bible and throughout history. These critics have never created anything of value, or built anything with their own hard work. Individuals who are busy with absorbing goals and work, have no time to demolish others with their intentional gloomy remarks.
The "Can Do" people will always have "Shouldn't Do" foes. It is particularly essential to home life that these gloom and doomers not get a foothold. It is possible you will deal with this, when family members or friends think that it is healthy and good to constantly contradict anything that is good and lovely. Sometimes they think they are just being open-minded or engaging in what is called "constructive" criticism.
Roses by Catherine Klein
Some of the early explorers and pioneers and anyone who set out to achieve something good, knew that whenever they attempted to build something or accomplish something, someone would try to stop them. Armed with that bit of knowledge, they saw discouraging words for what they were: an attempt to stop them from doing something beneficial to their families or to others.
This happens in families, in churches, in towns and countries. Someone will always be out there ready to make sure you don't get ahead, ready to stop you from enjoying your life, from growing in wisdom and knowledge, or from doing well.
Knowing this can help you to continue with your work and your plans. Just expect the disgruntled, ungrateful, jealous people to give you a hard time. It is part of the territory. Anything that was ever achieved, even raising a family or keeping a home, was accomplished despite the whiners and complainers.
I quite liked Roxy's article because it illuminated the effect the critics can sometimes have if you let them. There has always been the naysayer and the discourager, just as there has always been possibilities and people who pursue the good and lovely things in life.
1. Realize it comes from people who are looking for faults. That in itself tells you where their minds are.
2. Some critics are not happy about life.
3. Never give in to these detractors. Tell them what you are doing is just fine.
4. We used to tell them to "grow up," or "get a life" or go back to their mother's basement.
5. When we stop telling them to mind their own business, we let them run wild and free and then their mental sickness spreads and multiplies and we end up with critics from all sides.
6. Sometimes these attitudes are bred into them from their home life, where people gripe all the time instead of building one another up, encouraging each other and helping others succeed.
7. Other times they are well brought up but after a number of years in institutions of education, become indoctrinated to criticize and to suspect anything that is good, natural, pure and lovely.
8. Don't let anyone stop you from your good goals and your accomplishments.. you may have to work gently around them and occasionally smile at them and offer a cup of tea. Eventually they will settle down and accept that life does not stop.
Scene: from the north room with a view.
