How to Have a Bad Day (Finding the path of hope, when things go wrong)

Have you ever had a bad day?

Someone faxed me a funny sheet that said at the top, “You Know It’s Going To Be A Bad Day When…” It included statements like:

• You know it’s going to be a bad day when you get out of bed in the morning and put your pants on backwards - and they fit better.
• You know it’s going to be a bad day when you’re driving to work and your horn gets stuck behind a group of Hell’s Angels.
• You know it’s going to be a bad day when you pull into the parking lot at work and a large TV truck, with a satellite dish pointed at the sky, says, 60 MINUTES NEWS TEAM on the side.
• You know it’s going to be a bad day when you wake up in the morning and discover your water bed sprung a leak during the night, but you suddenly realize you don’t have a water bed

We all have our tough days, don’t we? We all have our down days, myself included. But the amazing thing is we don't have to live as victims of our circumstances. Two of my favorite quotes remind me of this on difficult days:

Charles R Swindoll says, "...everyday we have a choice regarding the attitude we will enbrace for that day."

Tim Hansel says, "life is difficult, pain is inevitable, but misery is optional."

The great heroes we admire overcame terrible circumstances as Dear Abby quotes in her wonderful article entitled, "So Hang In There"

• Bury him in the snows of Valley Forge, and you have a George Washington.
• Raise him in abject poverty, and you have an Abraham Lincoln.
• Subject him to bitter religious prejudice, and you have a Benjamin Disraeli.
• Strike him down with infantile paralysis, and he becomes a Franklin D. Roosevelt, the only president of the United States to be elected to four terms.
• Have him or her born black in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you have a Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, Marian Anderson, George Washington Carver or Martin Luther King Jr.
• Make him the first child to survive in a poor Italian family of 18 children, and you have an Enrico Caruso.
• Have him born of parents who survived a Nazi concentration camp, paralyze him from the waist down when he is 4, and you have the incomparable concert violinist ltzhak Penman.
• Call him a slow learner,'retarded', and write him off as ineducable, and you have an Albert Einstein.

So hang in there my friend. I know it can be tough.
© Bill Drury, 2010