How to Be Grumpy on a Perfectly Good Day

It was an unfortunately crummy day. To be honest, there was no reason it should have been: I didn’t snooze my alarm. I walked into work two minutes early. I ate a healthy lunch. I was caught up on my homework. It was all a recipe for success, but I guess there are just some days where hormones, gray skies, and too many puddles conspire against you to bring you down, no matter what you do.

By midafternoon though, I felt like I was going to burst into tears if I even opened my mouth—and then my phone vibrated. It was a text from my sister-in-law, telling me that she’d been thinking of me. I texted her back and reluctantly told her my day was quite crummy. She then gave me a call.

She might not have been able to understand me very well through my barely controlled sobs, but she was patient and loving and understanding. She didn’t try to tell me that I was dumb or silly or that I needed to get over my bad day. She didn’t try to fix it or give me perfectly packaged solutions for how to change my attitude; she simply listened.

Eventually I stopped choking over my tears, and I felt a little bit better. And once I stopped talking, I was finally ready to start listening.

After I asked how she was doing, my sister-in-law told me about her day and about an unexpected funeral she had attended.

Her neighbor’s baby was born with cancer a few months earlier, and despite all of the treatments, the baby had still passed away. At the funeral, the baby’s parents somehow had bright eyes filled with tears and bright testimonies filled with hope.

I became silent; suddenly, my bad day didn’t seem so crummy anymore. I felt silly for allowing myself to have a bad day, and that morphed into feeling even worse because even after telling myself to not feel so down, I couldn’t help but still feel crummy.

Amidst all of these swirling thoughts and ever-blackening emotions, I sat down at my desk, started my computer, and glanced at one of the first screens that popped up. It was a note sheet from a devotional I had recently read. It said:

During my doctoral coursework there was a significant concept that I could not wrap my mind around. Needless to say, this was frustrating, and it made me question my participation in the PhD program altogether. One night after my family had gone to bed, and after having spent the better part of the day trying to internalize the concept, I turned in frustration to my Father in Heaven. My prayer to Him was simply that I had tried to understand but had failed. If He didn’t directly help me, I would not succeed. I turned the problem over to Him. Within ten minutes of offering that prayer, my understanding was opened and I was able to proceed.

I marveled at this. Why should the Creator of heaven and earth care about what is essentially a trivial problem compared to the troubles of the world and the scope of all of His creations? Aren’t there more desperate prayers to be answered?

I was taught by this—and have remembered since—that my Heavenly Father cares about what I care about in righteousness. Even though my problem was minuscule, He intervened and moved me forward because it was important to me. (William Lund, “For God So Loved You,” August 5, 2014)

Immediately I felt chills sweep from my toes to my shoulders—not the uncomfortable kind, but the ones that suddenly remind me that I’m not alone. The beauty of an ever-present and all-loving Heavenly Father isn’t just that He cares or that He sees us on a general level, but that He is involved even with the little things.

I have no doubt that He was watching over that couple as they stood at the graveside, watching a tiny casket enter the frozen, unforgiving ground. And I know that He was with me too. He has some pretty big prayers to answer and some large-scale guidance to give, and yet He doesn’t let His individual children feel any less loved in their day-to-day struggles.