Like everyone else I have good days and bad days. A good day comes down to a whole number of reasons, of which one will undoubtedly be my attitude. So when I'm having a good day and someone posts one of those motivational positivity things on Facebook, I'm likely to read it with a self-congratulatory nod in my own direction, a kind of self-praise for feeling good about my day, my self, my life. And, perhaps, just maybe, an underlying complacency bordering on arrogance that life is ever and only what you make of it.
Point is, not every day has the same content, circumstances, events and eventualities. There are bad days, and no matter how hard I try to rethink it, reconfigure it, explain it, try on varying perspective spectacles, it's still a bad day. Not all bad days are caused by our own negativity; and not many can be cured by self-summoned positivity. Some can, but not all; and for some people, not many,
For some of us, sometimes, very few bad days are improved by someone thrusting the benefits of self-induced positivity into a face that is wet with tears, or creased with anxiety, or nervous of yet more hurt. And then there are those whose face is rendered expressionless through the utter fatigue of trying to face a world when their sadness of heart is chronic, the wounds of the spirit are deep and sore, and resources to cope are so exhausted the distinction between a good day and bad day has dissolved into despair. And for such folk self-reproach is already so normalised that every one of those blessed meme things merely rubs their face in the rubbish of every bad day.
Those who spend their time alongside people who are going through "the valley of deep darkness", who weep with those who weep and laugh with those who laugh, who befriend the sad, accompany the lonely, listen to the complaints and laments and anger and sorrow of those who are having yet another bad day, realise the importance of editing that meme above. The psalm poet knew perfectly well that we are "fearfully and wonderfully made", that is, that we are complex, complicated, uniquely created, and every one of us flawed, broken, vulnerable and yet with such immense possibility for joyful embrace of life. But not everyone's possibilites come to pass; and it isn't always down to their attitude. Life has a way of shattering hopes as well as illusions, and some things in life can't be so easily fixed, if at all.
I think of that meme before it was corrected, and the message it sends to folk who are struggling just to get through the day intact, no worse off, maybe even with some regained strength, purpose or hope. And I am full of admiration for their courage, yes, their atttitude. It takes more determination, guts, courage, sheer human persistence against encroaching circumstance, to work through a bad day feeling bad, than it ever will to sail through a good day feeling good.
When I read the psalms of lament, those prayers of anger and anguish, those poems of heartbreak, resentment and complaint against God himself, I am reading authentic prayers from those who know that a bad day isn't all down to their attitude. Psalms of lament show the power of negative thinking, of looking the worst in the face and telling God it is intolerable, unfair, cruel, an affront to faith itself. And instead of trying to change their attitude something else happens.
"Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my help and my God. (Psalm 42,5)
Not a change of attitude, as if someone so cast down could somehow find the strength of will just to "accentuate the positive". These psalms of lament work by looking away from my own broken resources to the God in whom is hope, and from whom hope will come, and it will come. "I shall again praise him" is an assertion of faith in a different future, but it is not a denial of the hard to endure present. The soul is not telling itself to change its attitude; it is re-orienting mind, heart and spirit around the reality of the God who "by day commands his steadfast love" (v8) Indeed the whole of that verse is about how my personal attitude to good days and bad days is the least relevant thing about them. What matters is the faithfulness of God who by day commands his steadfast love, while "at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life."
And when in that same Psalm the poet let's God have it all, the questions, complaints and pleadings of his case, he addresses all this to the God whom he calls, "My Rock". (9) Whatever else shakes, shifts, shatters, the Psalmist thinks of God as impermeable, durable, stabilising Rock. Or as Samuel Rutherford says,“Believe God's love and power more than you believe your own feelings and experiences. Your rock is Christ, and it is not the rock that ebbs and flows but the sea.”
As a pastor, often sharing those experiences that make up the bad days in people's lives, I read some of those superficial feel good, feel different memes with their underlying wishful thinking. "The difference between a good and and a bad day is…..", well, obvious to those who are having a bad day. And what makes the difference is not being told to change their attitude, but being accompanied and supported in that difficult place, and being free to pour out their negativity and hurt, their complaint and sadness, their sense of loss and longing for hope, to God who is a Rock of immovable love. The Book of Psalms is a wonderful book to read on bad days, because it will never offer the saccharine artificial sweetness of mere positivity. "Hope in God; for I shall again praise him."
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