Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I just want the day to start over. The alarm goes off and for some reason it beeps extra annoyingly, the snooze button then doesn’t want to work because the touch-screen on my phone decides it wants to humor itself. And so it watches me struggle, as the alarm gets louder and louder and I grow even more annoyed with the early morning. And to top it off I wake up with a creek in my neck that has disabled me from turning my head.
I just want a new beginning.
My mentor told me last week that we should be rejoicing in our trials and tribulations. I had also read it somewhere in the Bible at one point… I think. I usually don’t want to remember things like that because I’d rather complain and grumble about everything, even though that in turn makes it all worse (it just helps me with expressing myself).
So as I laid in bed this morning trying to recover from my wrestling match with my cell phone, I started thanking God for stuff – you know, things like the weather, dark rooms, and my warm fluffy bed. But then I just kind of stopped because I started drifting off to sleep again, and then my alarm reminded me it was time to get up and I entered round two of the wrestling match with the thing.
And the day, surprisingly, hasn’t seemed to get much better. My losing matches today have gravitated around technology. My email’s acting up and I can’t get half of what I write to people to send, I can’t seem to figure out why my phone isn’t sending text messages, and I’ve decided that trying to figure it all out is, well, a trial.
And I must rejoice – though I don’t want to.
I’m reminded that suffering (and this, indeed, is suffering for me today) produces perseverance, which develops character, which produces a hope that will not disappoint (Rm. 5). So my trials result in an everlasting hope being established in my life… and in that process my character is shaped.
I think God has a twisted sense of humor – but I like that about Him.
