Correlation between Prosperity Gospel, Pride Cycle, and Humility/Gratitude

This is a subject that hits close to home for me. I literally felt that if I paid my tithing and fulfilled my priesthood duty God would bless/protect my young family from calamity. I feel that I was given this assurance many times in different contexts in the church – and I was eager to believe it. When my third child was stillborn I was hit with a rude awakening. What promises do we really have? My entire family could be killed in a car accident (or the planet earth could be hit with an extinction level event) tomorrow and tithing payment is not going to prevent that.

It seems that the cycle starts when people are humbled and choose to express gratitude

So in a way I have been humbled from my prideful sense of entitlement. It caused my faith crisis. I was in free fall and I do not believe that I chose where I eventually landed. It seems to me that different people can have a faith crisis and find solid footing again at different places. For me it did not feel like I chose where I landed but rather that I hit the floor and looked around to try to get my bearings.

choose to express gratitude – and use that as a lens for viewing their lives with. Then, that person learns more and have faith that as they do specific actions, they will be blessed (the Prosperity Gospel).

I do believe that people can over time change some of the elements of their life through a change of perspective. The perspective allows them to perhaps focus on what they can control and to make positive and healthy choices. Over time those positive choices may yield fairly consistent positive results. We as humans tend to ascribe success to our own choices and actions (whereas we tend to ascribe failure to forces outside of our control). Therefore over time we may become overconfident and believe that we can control our own destiny.

I suppose that this can be a source of pride. I am not sure that this is unhealthy. I suppose that the opposite end of this overconfidence would be a sense of helplessness or even nihilism. There is probably a healthy level of moderate belief in oneself and one’s abilities to produce positive change.

However, it seems that the outgrowth of the Prosperity Gospel is essential in the Pride Cycle process – where sometimes the Prosperity Gospel promises are inflated to entitlement proportions and then the people are humbled again.

Maybe it is just a universal developmental cycle – like yeast rises and needs to be pummeled back down when making bread.

As a general trend, I do think that this can align with the circle of life. Children can have sheltered and happy childhoods that help them to have overinflated sense of their own importance. Then they become youth and young adults with big plans to change the world and control their destiny. Perhaps as they age and have families they can have big setbacks and develop a more humble outlook on life and limited control aspect on life. Finally they age and see their body and faculties fail them. They observe somewhat in bemusement how the rising generation sets out to change the world, all full of “piss and vinegar”. Individual life patterns can certainly vary but I think this is general enough to be a life cycle pattern.

I heard that if people keep a gratitude diary and spend time everyday thinking about what you are grateful for, it makes you a happier person.

My marriage became noticeably better when my husband and I started including in our morning email every day 1-2 comments of gratitude for what the other person had done the day before. These weren’t huge, flowery things – just “thank you for helping me get the girls to bed” or “I really appreciated that you took out the trash cans for me today”. Sometimes the comments I write are honestly just the bare minimum “thanks” – but other times, my heart is so full that while I try to find the words to say “thanks” – they do not do the situation justice.

My husband also took it upon himself to make sure I felt “cherished” every day – sometimes it was just extra hugs, or speaking one of my love languages by his actions (like extra cleaning/organizing). Some of the best ways I felt cherished where when he acknowledges that I do think differently, and that it might be due to Asperger’s (ASD) brain wiring – but he reminds me that it is because I think differently, and it might be because of my brain wiring, that he loves me and continues to find me a good friend and companion. When he starts including respectfully that an ASD trait might be at play in a conversation – and works with me to work around it – that makes me feel cherished. I think a Star Trek episode had a species say something in their parting with the Star Trek fleet that their relationship was forged because the Star Trek fleet “defended our boundaries without understanding them” – that has always stuck with me… and this is something kinda like that.