I’ll be blunt: It was a crappy day.
[Am I allowed to say the word “crappy” on the Internet?]
I had to go in to work at 4:30am. That means I need to get
out of bed about quarter after three. In the morning! I have hunter
friends who scoff at this early awakening, but at least they’re getting up to
go do something they enjoy.
The day was [see the adjective above] for a number of
reasons:
- It was really cold.
- It was the first week of January and there’s nothing to look forward to until, like, my birthday in April.
- I had to get up crazy early.
- Instead of going to church the day before I had spent two hours in the ER with two of my girls, who were both diagnosed with croup, so I felt rather disconnected.
- Did I mention how cold it was?
- Neither I nor my harried wife Bethany had gotten uninterrupted sleep lately, what with our sick infant across the hallway waking up at least once a night for the last week or more. *yawn* (Though for the record, Bethany had gotten much less sleep than I have)
- It was going to be a long day.
So I was moping internally. Probably externally too – I don’t
always know how others perceive me, so I may well have appeared mopey.
Woe is I! I am tired
and cold! My full-time job is busy enough to pay me time-and-a-half for at
least two days this week! Whimper-waaaaahhh!!
I was a dopey moper.
Occasionally I find myself in a mood that I don’t want to be
in. I am fully aware that I am being selfish or shortsighted or petty or
whatever, but “kicking” the mood, as Oswald Chambers espouses, doesn’t
always work. I suppose part of me somehow enjoys feeling sorry for myself, enjoys
moments of misery, even though common sense belies the logic of that sentiment:
Enjoying one’s own sadness? What the what?
I take no credit for removing myself from the mood, though.
I had a chance to tell a coworker a little bit about my family’s desire and
goal to move to the Bronx later this year, and soon found that my perspective on
the day had changed. I’ve got to keep the
big picture first, I thought. I’m
healthy and alive, as is my family (relatively speaking), and we’re together;
that’s more than many people can say. My coworker couldn’t understand why I
would want to take my young family into such a place as the Bronx – it just
doesn’t make sense! Then my mood improved, and that doesn’t make sense either.
God often works that way, doing things that don’t make sense to our eyes.
And I, for one, am glad that He does.
Armed with my rejuvenated mood and refreshed perspective, I finished
my work day and went home. Shortly thereafter Bethany took our
almost-8-month-old Juliet back to the doctor because she had barely eaten
anything since the day before. They went to the doctor, then straight to the
ER, then to their room in the pediatric wing of the hospital, where they stayed
for the next four days.
But that story will be another post. God gave me the
strength to handle the next several days as a single dad while Bethany was in
the hospital with our youngest. He sure knows what He’s doing, doesn’t He?
