When I was a kid, my grandmother used to stare at the wall and announce, "Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed today" and then if I didn't "get it", she would look pointedly at me to reinforce her message. I don't know if there even is a wrong side of the bed or not but if there is and if I can remember which side I woke up on this morning, then I can tell you which side to avoid in the a.m. - I can solve that mystery!
I'd like to be a "good" Christian every day and I'd love to say that the Pollyanna story I adored as a child (movie, doll and book..) helped shape the woman that I've become. But honestly, some days just inhale vigorously.
When I was still newly married, I went as an adult sponsor to a church camp in NW Arkansas. As a kid, I had absolutely loved that camp! As an adult, I absolutely hated it! Tepid to cold water in the showers, which was okay because you couldn't linger anyway unless you liked sharing the cubicle with spiders, which I didn't. Extraordinarily hot humid days. Open air lectures at night where mosquitoes reigned supreme. Kids falling out of bunk beds in the middle of the night. One pay phone (no cell phones) where I stood in line each night with a bunch of twelve-year-olds so that I could call my husband and cry about my homesickness. (The kids in line were stoic or happy. I was the one blubbering, not kidding...) Teen-agers acting snotty because I wasn't as much fun as their usual camp counselor (I was a last minute pinch-hitter). And on top of that, I had been asked to teach Baptist church history to a bunch of 4th grade boys. In an open air pavilion. While my papers flew in every direction and they concentrated on catching whatever wildlife happened to be crawling by. Try it sometime. I dare you.
The last morning I was there, I was trying unsuccessfully to rectify my sleep-deprived state by sleeping in when I overheard another camp counselor send a kid off to buy me a tee-shirt that said, "I survived camp so and so." It was a sweet thought but I never got it. After 4 literally sleepless nights and 5 stressful days, I went on a crying jag that Friday which lasted through morning devotions, the talent show, and our boxed to-go lunches. (Think Eleanor in the last scene of Sense and Sensibility... Ha!) To this day, I hope the kids didn't equate my sobbing with the quality of their performances... Needless to say, the other counselor didn't mention the tee-shirt gift and I didn't either. I hope someone got it who wore it proudly. As far as I'm concerned, if it didn't have a larger-than-life icon of a spider on it being carried off by a gargantuan mosquito, it wasn't authentic anyway....
I also remember how the other counselor in our "dorm" comforted me by saying the same thing she said to the kids.. :( As she put her arm around me, she said, "Some days are basically just rotten but the good thing is that once they are done, they are done. They won't come again and tomorrow is a whole 'nother day."
It may not be good theology - I'm no expert. But it rang true to me at the time and I've never forgotten it.
As a famous preacher once rang out, "It's Friday... but Sunday's comin'." You'd have to hear the whole sermon to know what he meant but basically, he was saying, one dark day, the Son of God hung on a cross -it was Friday. But Sunday - the day the tomb was found empty with the head wrappings laid aside to show the owner would be coming back - that resurrection Sunday was on it's way, even when the world experienced the worst darkness it had even known - Sunday was a'comin'.
(Today, I would have to say this doll was a better person than I, Gunga Din.. .Or something like that).
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