Bad Days

Have you ever had a day like this? You wake up in the morning and from the very first moment, everything seems awful. You want to crawl back under the covers, close your eyes, and shut out the pending awful day, but you know that life has to happen so you force yourself to get up. After leering at yourself in the bathroom mirror and pulling on the most comfortable clothes you can get away with at work or school, you drag yourself to the kitchen for breakfast. But the awful day has just begun, so within two minutes you manage to spill coffee in your lap, knock over your bowl of bland cereal, and accidentally kick the cat or dog across the room.

With a defeated sigh, you mop up your mess and head out to your destination, dreading any and all human interaction. As soon as you step past your doorstep, a wave of inconvenience hits you in the face and sends you reeling. Your car won't start or you forget to stop at a stop sign and end up getting a ticket from the police officer who seems determined to add on to this horrible day by being a stick in the mud. When you reach school or work, you end up being late because of the ticket and every annoying person comes out of the woodwork to torment you. Everywhere you turn, one thing after another gets in your way, making you dread your life, and making you wish you could revert back to the age of five.

By the time you stumble back into your house at six o'clock, having been further inconvenienced by rush hour traffic and a driver going as slow as possible while in front of you, you are ready to collapse into bed and resign yourself to the promise of a better tomorrow. But it is not to be. Within moments of kicking your shoes off, the phone rings; it's your boss scolding you for leaving work when you had a stack of paperwork to finish. While you don't have to come back to the office, he tells you sternly that you have to come in early tomorrow and finish the work. You knew this day wasn't going to go well and now the horribleness has bled into the next day. So you hang up the phone, place it gently on the kitchen table, take a deep breath, and proceed to scream as loud as you can into the mocking calmness of your house. While this does release some stress, it also scares the neighbors who call the police. An hour later, you're still explaining to the officer who knocked on your door that you're just having a really bad day.

While this version of a bad day might be a little over-dramatic and I may have thrown in every bad day stereotype to get the point across, I think you all know where I'm coming from. Bad days happen - times when you just wish that the world would stop turning and you could go back to yesterday. During a bad day, you just can't seem to be positive about anything, everything seems terrible, and nothing would make you happier than if everyone left you alone. But there is a way that you can get through bad days.

The next time you experience a bad day, try saying this to yourself, "Jesus is always with me in the mountain and the valley." This might sound silly, and you don't have to say it out load, but it really is true. Jesus is with us in all our troubles. Big or small, he's there to see every moment. Life really is a journey, and on the way everyone will go over high mountains and low valleys. While it can be really easy to remember that Jesus is with us as we stand on the top of a mountain looking out over wonderful things, all of us forget to call out to Jesus in the valley when we need him most. I have never come to a valley and remembered to call out to Jesus before I walked into it. All of us do this on a daily basis. But no matter what we do, every time we forget to call out to Jesus, he is with us anyway. He loves us so much that he is always by the side of the people who forget he's there. In every valley, Jesus is with us waiting for us to remember him; he loves us and wants to carry us to the next mountain. So no matter how low the valley, no matter how hard the climb up the mountain, and no matter how bad the day is, remember, our savior is always there. Loving us, waiting, caring, Jesus.