Our meditation today shall be on the benefits of cheerfulness.
And it came to pass in the month of Nisan, in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was before him, that I took the wine and gave it to the king. Now I had never been sad in his presence before. Therefore the king said to me, “Why is your face sad, since you are not sick? This is nothing but sorrow of heart.” – Nehemiah 2:1-2
There are some lessons on attitude and carriage in this passage for our consideration. Nehemiah had heard about the devastation of Jerusalem, his land of origin, and he was concerned enough about what he heard for his countenance to change from cheerfulness to gloom. And, according to him, he had never worn a long face before the king before, so the king was naturally concerned seeing him in such a mood.
The first lesson here is that Nehemiah might not have been appointed as a cupbearer of the king if he was always wearing a long face all the time. No matter how good he might have been as a wine-mixer, the sight of his long look would have disqualified him from being chosen to attend to the king; this thus underscores the importance of maintaining a cheerful attitude and countenance.
Those who are in the habit of wearing long faces do not always look attractive, neither is their attitude endearing enough to pull people towards them. Rather, they tend to drive people away with their mood swings and irritable behaviours. It is important to note that.
Secondly, even if Nehemiah had been given to forlorn expression and he had made it, against all odds, to become the king’s cupbearer because of his expertise, his depressed mood would have gone unnoticed by the king when it mattered the most that fateful morning because the king might have assumed that was how he always looked anyway. So there could have been nothing unusual that fateful day. The abnormality would have been for him to wear a cheerful expression!
This would have robbed him of the intervention he so critically needed and he would have continued to suffer in silence, getting agitated about happenings in his native land, but not having enough goodwill to do anything about it.
This underscores the importance of always wearing a cheerful expression and maintaining a positive outlook to life. Now the question is, what kind of look do people associate you with? Are you the cheerful type or the gloomy one? Do people associate you with cheerfulness and warmth or you are the cold and forbidding type? Resolve to correct that today, right now.
You will succeed in Jesus’ Name!
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