Some nights it’s all I can do to make it downstairs before I cry.
Some days are so much longer than my patience…so much tougher than my spirit…so much harder than I dreamed. Sometimes I can’t bear the thought of another day, let alone twelve-ish more years of days. Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking when I pleaded with God to allow my body to carry a child and for me to become a mother. I wonder what I possibly could have been thinking because this…well, this is not something I am cut out for.
But then, some nights it’s all I can do to make it downstairs before I cry.
Because some days….some days are as close to perfect as I can imagine. Some days the love in this house makes the walls of my heart bow and explode. Some days the snuggles are plentiful and the words are kind and the bedtime conversation lingers not because of her capacity to stretch it out, but because I don’t want it to end quite yet. And those days are what I hoped and prayed for all along.
It would be easy to call those days either “good days” or “bad days.” To slap a label on them and file them in one box or another: days we want to look back on, or days we would rather forget. Days we cherish, or days we wish had never happened.
If I’m honest, some days would even have sticky residue on them and labels that don’t quite want to stick any more for all of the changing: good moments….bad moments…really, really bad moments…. The labels get stuck on and ripped off more quickly than we can say the words.
But I wonder, really, if any of those days are really good or bad.
“There are no good and bad days. Just days of grace. Sometimes God gives us the grace to enjoy. Sometimes he gives us the grace to endure.” ~Graham Cooke
And I think that’s really what it’s all about. Because “good” or “bad, those moments all make up this life that is mine. It is mine, whether or not I asked for it or imagined what it would be. It’s mine, and it has been dispensed to me from the hands of grace. Sometimes it will look like I hoped, and sometimes it won’t.
It’s all part of the package, these “good days” and “bad days,” and I’m not too sure I would savor the sweetness of the good days if I hadn’t tasted the bitterness of the bad ones, too.
I wonder if maybe the bitter taste is allowed so that the sweetness will be appreciated. So that I can look around me in those days and say, “This really is a glorious life.”
I wonder, too, if maybe the sweet days are placed just so because is world has its troubles….it has its bad days…it has more than its share of bitterness, and the human heart was not designed to bear nothing but bitterness.
So in the end, yes, I suppose it’s all grace. It’s all grace, poured out and scooped up and in the end, it is labeled good.