Car Wrecks and Other Bad Days

A bad day has two sides. First, there is the surface: you got in a car wreck, you lost your wedding ring, you forgot to bring lunch to work and ran out of money, you're low on sleep and had to handle a very irritating situation at work... the list could go on.

Today I am having one of those days, but as I waited for two hours in my car by the side of the road for the police to come, I decided to put my Muse and Incubus away (great musicians, though clearly atheist), and instead I slid a self-created mix of worship music to comfort me. It wasn't too long before I was listening to a song called "Hallelujahs" by Chris Rice (no, perhaps not the most original title, but you must admit, "hallelujah" is a really awesome word). It described beautiful things in nature.

At one point, he mentions a breaching whale. Every time I hear this line, I imagine myself on a beach at night. The sky is navy blue and starry, and sometimes I picture there to be a glowing white disc in the distance (the moon). The violet waves are gently lapping the beach, not substantial enough to create a lot of foam. These waves are cool and they blanket my feet for a moment, pulling the sand from beneath and around them, so that when the water has retreated, I am almost to my ankles in sand. Out in the ocean, the water is sparkling. There is no light to do this, except the stars and the moon. But then, the surface is disturbed as a great, dark creature rears itself from the water. It is far from the shore, but you can see that it is huge. It moves gracefully back under, and then swims up again, only to flop on the surface, like its playing.

That image stuck with me too heavily for me to think of any others, but it was powerful. It was at this point I paid attention to the second side of a bad day: the resolution. If God is big enough, powerful enough, and wonderful enough to create oceans and whales and all sorts of things that were abstract ideas before, then why am I worried about so many things today? They are things that I will need to solve, but nothing truly important has been compromised. Instead, I have been building my faith. I had a car wreck, but if God can raise mountains, calm storms and form the very sky that I stand under, then there is no reason to fear the loss of things only made valuable by other men.