I experienced a day at the office yesterday that would be considered in kind words to be a crappy day.
It was one of those days when any thing that could go wrong, did. It was a day of technological challenges with computer woes and tension heaped hours of frustration.
The words didn't bounce easily from the keyboard. It was a struggle.
It's one of those days that you'd like to get a 'do-over'. It was a day once the end of the work shift came, you'd like to forget it ever happened.
It was a dreary Monday to top it off with chilly rain and gray skies.
It was blah.
As I sat down in my easy chair last evening and thought back on the horrid day just past, God spoke to my heart a simple truth.
“Don't look back, you are not going that way,” I heard him say to me.
It was simple, but the truth.
Even on a bad day, we can praise God and be thankful that we are moving forward.
We read in 2 Corinthians 5:7, “for we walk by faith, not by sight”.
How many of you know God has a way of taking the blinders off and getting our attention focused on the things that really matter.
It was not the time to fret and beat myself up on my personal shortcomings and woes of the day, but a time to look forward with hope that there won't be a repeat of such a day. It was time to look at the big picture and not focus on this one speck in time when things were not so good.
The day was done. It was time to forget it.
An old proverb states that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Sometimes we make the process more complicated than we need to. We will never make a journey of a thousand miles by fretting about how long it will take or how hard it will be. We make the journey by taking each day step by step and then repeating it again and again until we reach our destination.
We don't worry about the potholes, the cracks and the dips in the road.
Indiana native John Wooden was perhaps the greatest college basketball coach in the history of the game. He had four full undefeated seasons. His UCLA teams won 10 national championships. At one point, he had a streak of 88 consecutive wins.
One of the first things Coach Wooden drilled into his players when they arrived on campus was something his father had taught him when he was a boy growing up on a small Indiana farm.
“Don’t worry much about trying to be better than someone else,” his father said. “Learn from others, yes. But don’t just try to be better than they are. You have no control over that. Instead try, and try very hard, to be the best that you can be. That, you have control over.”
What a great piece of advice for those ball players and advice we can all learn to follow in our spiritual lives.
As we read about the great souls in the Bible who have preceded us, we learn that they too had times of discouragement and sorrow. We learn that they persevered in spite of hardship, in spite of adversity, sometimes even in spite of their own weaknesses. We learn that they also had a few crappy days, like I experienced yesterday, but they continued to press forward, one step after another.
So yesterday is gone as a memory.
Sometimes we just have to smile. Pretend that everything is okay, hold back our tears, know that God is with us and just keep walking.
Be blessed.
These morning messages are now available by email. Simply write me with you email address at schneider.nick@gmail.com, and I'll be happy to forward them to your in-box. Also, all of the photos in my blog are for sale. Contact me for pricing.
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