It Went Wrong By Eleven

By eleven in the morning it was over, and you spent the next six hours attending the funeral.

Let us get the facts down, because they deserve to be said properly.

The traffic. Then the thing about the bathroom. Then the moment where the middle one said the sentence about the whole day being pointless, in a voice that carried, in front of people. Then the food that nobody would eat and the money that had already gone on it. And then you, at about half past ten, saying something you can still hear yourself saying.

By eleven you had written the day off. And you were correct that the morning was bad.

What I want to argue with is the writing off. Because at eleven in the morning you issued a verdict on a day that had thirteen hours left in it, and then you spent the rest of it collecting evidence for a case you had already decided.

And here is the thing that will annoy you slightly, and I say it with a great deal of affection: your children have almost certainly filed that day differently from you. Somebody in that car is going to tell the story of that day at their own wedding.

All things work together

There is a verse in Romans that gets said to people at the worst possible moments, usually badly, and it is worth reading carefully because what it actually claims is narrower and stronger than the version people use.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28, King James Version)

You have a promise in the written word about what God does with things, and no morning has ever once been excluded from that sentence for being too ordinary. Romans 8:28 says all things work together rather than all things are good, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies that to a Tuesday with a bathroom crisis in it.

Notice what it does not say. It does not say the day was good. It does not say the traffic was secretly a blessing or that the argument was character building. That reading has done real damage to real people and it is not in the text.

It says the things work together. Which is a claim about what God is doing with the material, not a claim about the quality of the material.

You are not required to call that morning good, and no part of this has ever once asked you to be glad about a single minute of it. It is written that all things work together for good rather than that all things are good, which is why the honest account of the morning stands, and the Spirit of God is what keeps a promise from turning into a demand.

And the promise is about God's work rather than yours, which is the part that should take weight off you. Nothing in the verse gives you a job. The working together is not something a father produces by having a better attitude in a parking lot.

You are not the one who has to make that day mean something, and no amount of effort on your part has ever once been what the verse was waiting for. The Holy Spirit is the one doing the work that verse describes, and Romans 8 puts every verb of it on God's side of the sentence.

Eleven in the morning is not a judge

Now the practical part, and it is about the specific moment the day ended.

Eleven in the morning. That is when you closed the file. And everything after eleven was experienced by you as the aftermath of a failure rather than as the afternoon.

That is not a small distinction, because your family had a completely different afternoon from you. They were in it. You were at the inquest.

You are able to be present in an afternoon that follows a bad morning, and no eleven o'clock has ever once had the authority to end a day at eleven. The Spirit of God is what brings a man back into the hours he is actually standing in, and it is written that the working together is ongoing rather than concluded.

And here is what I want to say about the sentence you said at half past ten, because I know you are still carrying it.

You said something you would not have said if you had slept, and you know it was wrong, and you have already been over it about forty times. Nothing here is going to tell you to handle it better next time, because that advice is useless and you have already given it to yourself.

You are allowed to have said the wrong thing at half past ten, and one sentence in a bad hour has never once been the whole of what you are to these children. It is written that all things work together for good, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present with a father going over something at one in the morning for the fortieth time.

Say it to whoever heard it, plainly, once, and then let it be done. That is the whole repair and it takes about nine seconds.

Tell one story out loud

So here is the assignment, and it is going to feel like the opposite of what the day deserves.

Tell one story from the worst day out loud at dinner this week.

Not the whole day. One story, and pick the one that is actually funny, because there is always one. The bathroom. The thing somebody said. The food nobody ate. The face on the man at the gas station.

You are able to say a bad day out loud without ratifying it as a disaster, and telling it has never once been the same thing as pretending it was fine. Romans 8:28 has God working things together rather than requiring anybody to rank them, and the Spirit of God is with a family at a table hearing a story about a morning that went wrong.

Here is why this works, and it is not positive thinking. A story that gets told becomes a family story. A story that never gets told stays a private judgment, and your children will fill the silence with their own explanation, and children usually explain a silence by deciding it was about them.

So the telling does two things at once. It moves the day from the verdict column into the story column, and it tells everybody in the room that the day is allowed to be spoken about.

You are able to move a day out of the verdict column, and telling it as a story has never once required it to have been a good day. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a household laughs about something that was genuinely hard, and it is written that all things work together, which is a process still going on.

And do not add a moral. Do not finish with what we learned. Tell it, let people laugh, and pass the food.