"I'm Having A Bad Morning, I Need To Wear A Crown"

So what do you do when you are having a bad day?  According to one of my Pre-K friends you wear a crown.  One morning I noticed when she came in she had a crown. I asked her was she a Queen. She replied, "I'm having a bad morning, I need to wear a Crown".  As I thought about the 5 year old logic I decided maybe I need to buy a crown and put in my desk drawer for those "bad mornings"! 

What makes a day "bad"?  For a five year old it can be as simple as not wanting to eat breakfast or wear shoes.  As adults that doesn't even come close to what we consider a bad day would be but to a five year old that is their world.  I wonder how many things we consider as a "bad day" would really qualify as a bad day or maybe just our attitude about the day. 

One Friday morning I left my house to go to work and I discovered I my car had a flat tire.   My first thought was, "Oh great, I don't have time for this and I need to get to work"!  I called On-Star and they said it would be 45 minutes before someone could come out and change the tire. My day just kept turning into a bad day!  I went back inside and in about 30 minutes the guy called and said he was almost at my house.  When he got there he was friendly and asked me how I was doing. My first thought was, "how do you think I am doing?"  But I said, "well I've had better days."   As he begin the process of changing the tire he begin sharing how it was a good thing I was home and not on the road. He said, "you would have been on the interstate and had a blow out which could have caused an accident and you could have been hurt."   I knew he was right but I did not want him to make my bad day less than what I wanted it to be! I agreed he was right, but I still wanted to own my bad day!  When he completed and was ready to leave his parting words to me were, "I hope you have a blessed day and your day will improved". 

As I got in my car to drive to work, I begin to ponder what he had said.  Having a flat tire seemed like the biggest obstacle to my day.  But in the "real world" that was not very bad.  I should have been thankful that I was at my own house, no one was hurt and even though that was not what I wanted to spend my money on I should be grateful that I had the money to buy new tires.  Sometimes we get caught up in "our own inconvenience" and think that constitutes a bad day. 

A Stanford Research Institute study shows that 87.5 percent of people's success in life can be traced to their positive attitudes, while just 12.5 percent of their success comes from their aptitude, knowledge, or skills.   So even on those "bad days" we need to choose to develop and maintain positive attitudes so our lives will be become positive. Even when we encounter challenges we will be able to handle the inconvenience with a positive attitude.  This is not a onetime event it is a lifelong process.

We can't control situations or people, but we can choose how we respond to them. I think they are four key things we should ask God to help us to respond in positive ways: faith, hope, clear vision, and the energy to do what we are to do. If there are things we cannot change we need to ask God to give us the peace we need to deal with them.

So the next time I am having a bad day, I am going to wear a crown and ask God to help me change my attitude from a negative to a positive. 

"He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together" Colossians 1:17