Now, some supercilious humbug could be reading this and argue that it seems to them that the veracity of the title depends heavily upon the nature of the question (not my regular readers, you understand. But theoretically, one of you could be reading this in a public place and could have a personage of peeping pompocity peering over your shoulder. Disclaimers exist for such as these), and I suppose there is something to that. If your question, as an example, is, “How can I cure myself of diabetes?” then yes, this is not a shining example of a wise answer. Then again… if you are trolling the internet for a blog to offer you an answer to such a question, then I’d say the blame is 50/50.
I don’t believe in bad days. I just don’t think they exist. There is not a single day that you or I have ever lived that has nothing redeemable, nothing praiseworthy, and even if such a disgusting unicorn had ever taken place, the very trials that we generally blame for the “badness” of a day are, according to God, precisely the things He is constantly using for your good and glory. Hardly a thing to call “bad”. So what I am about to describe to you was not a bad day. But it did bombard me early on with some hardnesses, let us say.
Normal discombobulation happens. Welcome to being human. You write your script for the day, it generally involves a perfect coiffure and liquid eyeliner that doesn’t smudge, toast that you get to eat while it is still hot, and children playing happily with something wooden in the corner (I don’t know why the wooden thing pops up in my script, except it just seems so much holier and quieter). You have a telemed appointment on the books, over Zoom, so the above-mentioned coiffure/liner combo is on point (because nothing says “No worries, Doc, I am in perfect health” like a smooth liquid line) at 8 am, and you feel prepared when the call comes.
What you possibly were less prepared for was getting the cranky nurse who immediately says, with dare I say unnecessary brusqueness, “You are out of state??” Ahem. Yes. Have been, actually. As long as you have been you in Idaho, I have been me in Washington and we have enjoyed many a blissful telemed appointment just like this one. Well, it seems that everything that was true amidst the madness of covid (side note: I was informed the other day that there have been articles circulating with messaging to the affect of, can’t we all just forgive each other for covid? Hm. Has someone apologized and I missed it? Sad about sleeping in that day…) has ceased to be true. We thought your health was reliably tended to from a distance when we were scared of your face, but now we think that flimsy paper mask is pretty much as safe as hundreds of miles, and that you are no longer a dependable patient at a distance. That’s right — she rather tactlessly informs me that I should just find a new pain doctor.
Like having someone hand you a box of Nerds, shrug, and tell you just to find the yellow MnM. It’ll be fine.
But this doesn’t wrap up at 8 am. Oh, no. She sighs so heavily that I can comfortably applaud her for the demonstrable lack of smoking in her life, and says she’ll call me right back.
So I wait. I do not pass go, I do not do yoga, I do not shower or start school. I sit by the phone, lest I miss this important communication. An hour passes… I timidly begin baking… 2 hours… this is feeling silly, so I call the kids to the table for school, which of course is what brings about the call. Sorry, no resolution, we are sure it will all work out and we are reasonably likely to tell you if you need to buy a plane ticket in the next 26 hours.
Well, I feel better.
But now, we are faced with a choice. The happenings of the morning can either make us sore and cranky, we take our cosmic huff out on the Quail and have every vocabulary and spelling word somehow relate to “medical tyranny” and “spinelessness”, and make sure that every person we encounter that morning knows what a frustrating experience you had and oh, did I mention the liner smear?? There is definitely a strongly, one might even say vociferously worded text to the husband in this scenario, not so much so that the poor man is invited to fix anything but just so he KNOWS that there is fresh injustice in the world and a good reason for him coming home to an emotionally snarled up wife.
Or… we could bake a cake.
We could stare down the frustrations with a smile, not because we are Pollyanna (who definitely did not know how to wear a drop waist, much less a liquid line), but because we know our frustrations come to us from the hand of the Almighty and everything about me is written on that hand. He knows me. We could, in fact, take the flaming ball of difficulty that has been pitched at our day, coat it pretty in frosting and pitch it back.
“Remember this: If any other condition had been better for you than the one in which you are in, divine love would have put you there.” — Charles Spurgeon
So, I thanked God and baked a cake. A gorgeous Orange Blossom Honey Pistachio cake with Pistachio Swiss Buttercream frosting. It chilled in the fridge while we pressed on through a late start in school and a tired morning and phone calls I didn’t want to take. I had the privilege of serving up thick slices of cake with tall cold glasses of milk to the Quail in the middle of the afternoon while they played board games with the Beloved.
There are no bad days when you belong to this good God. And because He is good, cake is the answer. Go to it.
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