Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day Grace

I don’t know how God’s Holy Spirit works to do what it does in my heart on days like today.  

   Give us each day our daily bread,
(Luke 11:3 ESV)

Truly it is a mystery to me.   But the sheer unlikeliness of the sequence of events that led to me starting out my day crying and ending it with enough energy to contemplate writing a blog post is miraculous.  

Let’s start the story three days ago when I started coming down with a nasty cold, jump to two nights ago when I got the stomach flu, fast forward to 1.5 days ago when I put my hip out of place while bending over to give Wendy a bowl of yogurt and was in excruciating pain even after I got it re-aligned that afternoon.   How I felt this morning when I woke up in review?  Bad cold + getting over 24 hour Stomach Flu + back spasm. 

I groaned out of bed and uttered one of those hardly-awake prayers that if it had contained any coherent words would have probably said “please, please just help me survive this day and not murder my children,” but probably just sounded like “uhhhg.”  Even though I couldn’t pick Wendy up, I faced a day of appointments in the morning, grocery shopping, making lunch for the whole family to take to the Seminary and trade kids and car for the stick shift truck to teach a class of 5-7yr olds about Bach and an afternoon and evening of teaching private music lessons.  And we were out of milk. 

I lost it.  By 7:45am I had a loaf of bread in the oven (since even breakfast couldn’t be simple cereal) and was sobbing on Jonathan’s shoulder in the kitchen about how impossible the day seemed.  Mostly I was dreading picking up Wendy (35lbs!) as much as I would need to to get her in and out of the car that many times. 

And I’m not gonna lie.   The morning was terrible.  I couldn’t talk past the frog in my throat.  I forgot my coffee. I forgot my pain meds and we were late so I couldn’t go back.  I wrangled Wendy in and out of the car, the stroller and the giant shopping cart with the car on the front, too many times to count.    She screamed and tantrumed and threw herself on the floor twice and I gritted my teeth and leaned over with my back screaming along to pick her up and force her back into the car or stroller.  The low point came when I had to change her poopy diaper while lying her on my coat on the asphalt of the parking lot, because the grocery store bathroom didn’t have a changing table???!!!  Charlie was pretty much perfect, since I had my witch face on and he was scared of me (which I’m not proud of, but it is true it comes out on days like today).  

We made it home to drop of the groceries but with barely enough time to meet Jonathan and I still hadn’t made our lunches.  I noticed while I was putting the groceries away that my back might be feeling better and then my wonderful husband suggested Subway for lunch.   Grace! Thank you, yes!    Now I  only had to pack my dinner instead of 4 lunches and one dinner.  We ate apples on the way.  Amazing what a little sugar in the blood stream will do to improve your mood!   I dropped off the kids at Subway, snagged my sandwich on the way out and thanked my good friend Karin all the way to Starbucks where I used her gift card to buy myself my first breve latte since last October.  I also found two Tylenol in my purse (which I took).    Grace!  Amazing what a little pain relief and caffeine will do to improve your mood!

I went on to teach the 5-7 year-old class about Bach and they laughed themselves silly trying to pronounce his name correctly with much spitting/hissing/and coughing over the last “ch”.  Something about their antics made me crack a grin for the first time that day.  Grace!

My first private lesson of the day called in sick, so I lay in the teacher’s lounge and knitted for an hour while finishing my coffee. Grace, just when I was really needing to lie down and rest!  Then I finished up my lessons and drove home to find that Jonathan had cleaned and vacuumed the whole house. It was sparkling clean! Grace! And then here’s the amazing part.   Five minutes after I got home, Jonathan left for a meeting.  So I had bedtime duty all by myself.  Usually it would make me come apart and yell at someone for something trivial like squeezing too much toothpaste out of the tube on purpose so they could eat it.  But tonight I decided they needed a candle lit lavender bubble bath—I sipped my mint tea, stuck in the occasional hand and watched them enjoy each other, playing in the bath.  I don’t know why I thought of this, or why it worked, but anyone with small kids will know what a miracle two siblings getting along in a tub full of toys is.  Grace?  Something about the atmosphere was so calming that I felt almost refreshed.  A couple diapers and two storybooks later, they are sleeping and I am typing.   I actually was nice to them tonight.   Is that the stuff of God or what?   I’m smelling him all over the house, but especially in the lavender scent coming off my hands.  What a loving God I serve! 

Now I am hoping he will help me have my voice back in time to sing for the Faculty recital I’m supposed to perform in on Friday.   But, one day at a time?  Right?   One day at a time and I will praise him for the portion he gives me, even if it is ‘terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-day’ grace!    

    And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings,
are full of eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say,
  
“Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty,
        who was and is and is to come!”
(Revelation 4:8 ESV)