I felt sorry for the guy. It became pretty apparent to me that this was not a good day for him. First he tried to change the light ballast in my office and dropped it on my desk. Pieces of glass scattered all across my desk and wedged their way into the files and papers that were strewn everywhere. He apologized and quickly attempted to dump them out of my files and get them removed. Meanwhile I’m on the phone trying to work through all of the raucous. I didn’t think much more of it until my co-worker said she saw the guy tumble off the step from the sidewalk onto the pavement while holding an 8 foot ladder. She saw him fall, roll and slowly pull himself back up. He limped away slowly to his car, humiliated and busted I’m sure. I can so relate!
Have you ever encountered a day that reeked of rottenness, much like a load of laundry you left in the washer too long? You know those kinds of days where you just break down and cry in the middle of the day because you can’t do anything about it and you apparently arrived at the end of your rope? It feels like you are on the set of catastrophic movie and you’re the lead actor. Except it’s real and you can’t escape it. Yes those kinds of days are the pits.
But the truth is we always have a choice of how we respond to crappy days. Sometimes a sour attitude will only exacerbate the already hostile day and send it into Def Con 2. Before we know we’re fighting with our spouse or being mean to our children, slamming doors, throwing things etc in an attempt to process all of the chaos swirling around us. I think what really sets us off the most is lack of control. We feel helpless and we don’t like it. Victimization begins to set in and we can’t seem to escape its powerful clutches.
I used to deal with this scenario every year at my birthday. It kind of became the family joke for us because every year on my birthday something bad always seemed to happen. One year a waiter dumped an entire bowl of hot sauce all over me. Another year I took some Benadryl and fell down while walking into a restaurant. You name it and it probably happened to me on one of my birthdays. I started to feel like a victim and helpless to do anything about it. So every year when my birthday rolled around I cringed just thinking about what catastrophe would befall me that year and what humiliation I would endure. Would I trip and fall, as is pretty common for me? Would I slam my hand in the door, which is also something I’m adept at completing or would someone spill hot coffee on me? Ugh I just hated it every year.
But I finally realized that this negative thinking paralyzed me and caused me to always EXPECT bad things to happen. And because I expected bad things to happen I often set it in motion. It’s called self fulfilling prophecy. It’s not that I created some negative force like the Dark Side of the Star Wars Force to emerge, although I do believe we are very often targeted by satan, our enemy. I think most of the time those awful birthdays were set in motion because I expected them and sometimes even created ways to fulfill that prophecy or prediction I made.
Over the years God taught me to speak over my day, especially my birthday. He showed me how to raise my expectations to believe that He had good things in store for me that day. Yes everything may not go as I planned but that doesn’t mean He can’t make something beautiful out of a day like that. Honestly I’ve learned to laugh my head off when I trip now or slam my finger in my drawer at work or spray myself in the face with a water hose in the middle of February (maybe someday I’ll write about that fun encounter). Honestly I learned to stop taking everything so seriously and just go with the flow, knowing God’s presence went before me and follows behind me to totally keep me guarded. So if anything good came out of those little incidences it’s been that I laugh all of the time now. And I don’t stress out about small things and make them total meltdowns. I don’t go into negative self fulfilling prophecy mode and start setting more rotten things in motion. Nah! I’m over it!
My advice is to start speaking blessings over your life and say the good things that God is saying to you, especially when you have a bad day. Before you go into a major malfunction, take a minute to pause and see what God would have you say about the situation and then SAY that! Say it 20 times a day if you have to. I promise your foul mood will turn around and probably your stinky situation will be impacted as well.
