Bad Days

You know that song, the one that I will now have stuck in your head for the rest of the day? “You had a bad day, you’re taking one down, you sing a sad song, just to turn it around…” Yep. That’s the one! Today feels like a bad day. My children didn’t want to get out of bed this morning, or dressed, or eat. And maybe they sensed that this would be a day to just ride it out at home.

It didn’t get better as I drove to work. The rain started before daybreak this morning and people apparently took the opportunity to test out their NASCAR driving skills through slick conditions. As I neared the main road into work, the red tail lights blazed. Stuck. I listened to the radio, figuring that if I was going to sit in a standstill, I was going to live it up! Then I heard the sirens, first an ambulance, then a fire truck, then a rescue squad SUV. Maybe it was the sirens that finally snapped me out of my disgruntled mood. Someone up ahead had a morning that they didn’t intend to have. Someone up ahead could have just experienced a life changing event. Here I was, a bit inconvenienced by this time in traffic but someone else was having a “real” bad day.

It got me thinking. Bad days are like mini trips down the depression path. They can gang up on us and make us feel like we are going through some really crappy stuff, and sometimes we are. But then sometimes we just need some perspective. Today seemed like a bad day to me, but I also learned that a friend from college was going to court to find out if the two sweet babies she and her husband have been raising are going back to their biological family. Another friend was sitting in a hospital not being able to eat, suffering because a medicine that was suppose to help her chronic illness went awry and was causing an acute infection. And then I passed the accident scene that I was slowly creeping toward, and saw the car top sawed off by the jaws of life and 10 paramedics lifting a board to a gurney on the road. Bad day perspective was starting to enlighten me.

My family has been through some bad days lately. It’s not that we should always have this perspective of “someone always has it worse” and if I hear one more person say, “God never gives us more than we can handle.” I’m going to scream. Because the truth is, some people get a whole lot more than they can handle every day. They sometimes get the top layer of junk removed only to have another load dumped on them within a few moments. God gave us hope, perspective, and he also gives us moments to draw joy from. Those are times of grace, those are gifts that we are to unwrap in the hardest times. And hard times are common. We have been studying Ann Voskamp’s 1000 Gifts at church and it takes this stance that we all have some hard life to go through, each in his or her own way, but if we can be thankful and see the small bits of hope in the dark times, it allows us to enjoy the truly good times where we can throw those cares away and just full-out live.

As we were talking about this grace in even the bad days, I realized that when I have been at my worst, I’ve been only able to see the bad stuff and fantasize about someone else’s seemingly perfect life. The bad seemed to generate more bad, and it was always hard to gain any perspective. That’s why it’s so essential to see the amazing little moments that make up this wild, crazy world. God gives us the ability to gain some perspective if we live it daily. If we are in the practice of noticing and being thankful for the little things: our children’s health, our full refrigerators, a warm embrace by someone who loves us just the way we are, we have the secret to defeat a bad day before it becomes a bad week or bad month or bad year. This is so much harder than just succumbing to the crud that can invade the beauty in a moment, but when we can recognize the sweet parts in the insanity, it doesn’t seem quite so ominous. So today, my goal is to armor myself for the bad days that will surely come, to drink in all the sweetness that life gives to me today, so that darkness cannot be around for too long. Grace in the bad days.