When I woke up this morning, for some reason I anticipated that today would be a fun day. And I was right.
It’s not that we partied today. We didn’t go to an amusement park or a ball game. We didn’t even really get much of a chance to sit around and talk.
We worked. And we worked hard.
And it was fun.
In fact, a lot of things didn’t go perfectly. We took a wrong turn on our way to our work site. We had to redo one aspect of the project we were working on four times. We ran out of materials when we thought we had everything we needed to finish.
And yet we still had fun.
A lot of how we experience life comes down to our own attitudes.
Proverbs 17:22 says, “A cheerful heart is good medicine.” Notice that this assumes first that we need medicine. We should expect difficult times. That’s life! Why do we often get so surprised and bent out of shape when things don’t go our way, when it’s actually pretty rare that we ever fully get our way? Getting our way is not what we really need in life. We need to learn to have a cheerful heart even when things aren’t going our way.
Jesus makes this possible. Jesus took our sin upon Himself so that we can have abundant life! He gives us reason to rejoice, even when we were hopelessly stuck in our sin.
So the next time you feel like throwing a pity party, remember the biblical command to “rejoice in The Lord always, and again, I say, rejoice!”