Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Our youngest granddaughter, Raegan, has entered into a new and big world–she is now in public school. She is all excited about being in Pre-K. It seems that the most thrilling part to her right now is getting to ride the big school bus. She is sharp as a tack but also prone to get into trouble at times. I had a discussion with her twelve year old sister the other day as we entertained the question of how long it will be before Reagan’s mother gets a call from the school that our little energetic girl has gotten into some mischief. Addy and I considered the idea of secretly writing down how many days into the school year we guessed it will be before Raegan gets into trouble to see which one of us guessed the closest. We abandoned that idea and thankfully after a whole week of school she has not been called to the principal’s office. But there was one little hitch last week.

After school everyday Raegan boards the big yellow school bus that transports her to the day care (I suppose she would rather I refer to it as “after school care” now that she is in big school!) where she stays until her mother gets off work. My wife works at the same facility and she came home the other day and told me what Raegan did: she ate another kid’s snack! When the other little girl looked in her back pack for her afternoon snack and juice there was none; Raegan had devoured it. That made for a day that potentially would not have the best of endings for either of those young ladies.

We have all had some days that we would label as bad. Bad because of accidents, mishaps, breakdowns, sicknesses—it is a list that seems to have no end. I am grateful that I have had far more good days than bad, yet I experience snags along the way from time to time. In those moments when frustration or even heartache seems to be the rule of the day, we are faced with a choice: do we allow the difficulty to determine our outlook, or do we look for ways to turn the bad day around and find good in it? I must admit, as I look back over the decades, that I wasted some good time along the path of my life simply because I allowed some mishap or other anomaly to hide the joy and gratitude that should outshine the hardship.

In Acts 16, the Bible records the account of two men, Paul and Silas, who were thrown into prison for doing the work of God: “After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison, and the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully. Upon receiving such orders, he put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks” (Acts 16:23-24, New International Version). Their circumstances were far more severe than most of the things that we allow to mess up a good day, and their attitude was outstanding even when they were treated badly and unfairly. Interestingly, they dealt with it in a most unnatural way: “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them” (verse 25). What a wonderful way to turn around a bad day.

Among the things that we can learn from this account is the power of refusing to allow circumstances, even unfair ones, to take away the joy that God puts in our hearts. A bad day can be turned around by acknowledging that God is worthy to be praised no matter what.

And back to Raegan’s snack snatching episode. As it turned out, she did it innocently. Her backpack and the other little girl’s were exactly the same and Raegan thought it was hers. So they simply traded snacks resulting in both of them having a happy ending to a great school day.