Am I Cursed?

Over the holiday break, I had a rather enlightening conversation with an old family friend. From the beginning of our friendship many years ago, he was a hard-working, honest, good guy, from a really good family. Sadly, everything he and his family did seemed to go wrong. 

I remember having several conversations when we were younger in which he joked that he and his family were cursed because no matter how hard they worked or strove, nothing quite seemed to work out for them. They didn’t think it was something evil like demonic oppression or a voodoo curse, but rather like a dark cloud that hovered over them. Or, perhaps God just hadn’t blessed them to be particularly fortunate, or He had ordained them to be downtrodden. At the time, being kind of young and naïve, I just assumed his talk was a joke, and that it was his way of making light of the areas where he thought they had fallen short. In hindsight, I should have thought deeper, because in these past conversations, he had revealed to me that his family actually openly discussed whether there was a curse on them.

So, during our recent conversation, he outright told me—not as a joke, but as an earnest statement and belief—that he thought the curse was real, and he asked my opinion on the matter. Well, I have given much thought in recent years to optimism and trying to create opportunities to improve one’s life, but I had never had someone expressly tell me (and in such stark terms) that they were cursed.

As I thought about it, I started by saying, “No I don’t believe in curses.” I continued by explaining that no matter who you are, there will be negative and sometimes horrible things that happen to you and your family; that is just part of life, and in and of itself doesn’t prove that you (or anyone, for that matter) are cursed. Instead, you need to understand that life can often be hard, and for some reason there had to be some deeper and positive reason, or outcome for their struggles.

What I told him next is the thought I want to share with you today, and that is: Once you believe you are cursed, or that God has somehow singled you out, then you might as well actually be cursed. If you don’t believe that you can change your situation, or that good actions and decisions won’t have a positive impact on your life, then it doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do. That mindset leads to a situation in which you don’t value the options, decisions, or actions that are available to you. And once you have reached this point in your life, then you don’t put effort into your decisions. How can you have a successful conclusion if you never take action on something that may lead to success?

In short, why put time, effort, and consideration into something if it makes no difference in the end? Or, put another way, if you believe the outcome will be negative, then negativity is a given.

My mind has rehashed this conversation numerous times because it hit home to me, not because I walk around constantly feeling cursed, myself, but from time to time, when feeling discouraged or feeling like things aren’t going my way, question why this has happened, or what did I do to deserve this. It was a realization talking with an old friend just how wrong those feelings and considerations are and how destructive they can be.

I know my friend and I are not alone in sometimes feeling that the world is against us, and I suspect most of us feel this way from time to time, so I hope my revelations can offer some inspiration and some rationale to realize it's not.