My daughter has started whining.  This must come with toddler-hood because she rarely whined as a baby.  But her new way of expressing her emotions is through scrunching up her face and spitting out this high-pitched whine.  And oh no, not just once or twice, but over and over and over. 

So it got me thinking about whining and it reminded me of a story I heard about last year.  It’s about a pastor from a church in Kansas City who decided to encourage his entire congregation to become complaint-free.  (Apparently his congregation had been full of trivial complaints and it was really having a negative impact on them.) 

The way that he proposed to do this was by giving everyone one of those purple rubber bracelets in the picture above.  Then he challenged them to wear the bracelets and every time they complained about something, they had to remove the bracelet and put it on the other wrist.  The goal was to go 21 days with the bracelet on the same wrist.

Now this pastor was a smart guy.  He wasn’t going to tell everyone to do this and not do it himself.  No, he wore one just like everybody else and found himself switching wrists often throughout the day. 

It took me three months to go 21 consecutive days, and I broke three bracelets in the process of just switching it back and forth.

Then a funny thing happened.  The pastor and church members began to experience some benefits as a result of whining less often.  One member found that his “chronic” back pain had disappeared.  Another woman who had frequently complained about headaches realized that her headaches happened only rarely now.  People began to realize that their reasons for complaining were not there anymore! The pastor described this process:

I believe that your mind is a manufacturer, and your mouth is a customer. And if the customer stops buying what the manufacturer is producing — in other words, you stop complaining, the manufacturer retools, and you literally start thinking happier thoughts.

This amazing phenomenon has encouraged millions of people around the world to try eliminating their own complaints by donning bracelets of their own. The church has a website devoted to getting the cute purple bracelets out to those who want to give it a go. You can find them here.

I find so much inspiration in this story and it makes me laugh when I imagine my daughter having to switch wrists every time she whines.  She’s lucky that she’s not older otherwise she would be!  But it’s a lesson for myself to be aware of my own whining and complaining and to be a good example.  And ya never know, maybe I’ll have to find a rubber bracelet to put on my wrist too!