Everyone has bad days.  It’s a rare individual who can live a life and escape at least one bad day.

Yet we face them in different ways.  Some have a pity party.  Some phone a friend or their spouse and vent.  Some do far worse things, like using a bad day to proclaim theirs a bad life and sink into depression.  Some use a bad day as an excuse to behave badly, taking out their frustrations on others who had absolutely nothing to do with the cause for their bad day.  And some take in the effects of a bad day so deeply that it robs them totally of their present and that robs them of their future.

The good thing is we get to choose how we react to a bad day.  We might elect to learn from any mistakes we (or someone else) made and move on.  We might seek a way to avoid those mistakes happening again.  Or we might treat ourselves to a bubble bath and destress with a quart of ice-cream.

Different things work for different people.  For me, I’m reminded of a case that happened in Florida.  A man, James Richardson, was accused of killing his seven kids.  He was convicted in under two hours and spent the next twenty-one years in prison, having a continuous succession of bad days. Every day was a bad day all that time.

How James Richardson didn’t lose hope or give up or how he withstood the painful things that were said and done to him, I don’t know.  But I do know that while that was a long, and I’m sure a seemingly endless season of darkness, after twenty-one years James wasn’t electrocuted, which is what his sentence called for initially.  At some point, when the government halted the death penalties, James’s sentence was reduced to life in prison.

I wonder if he considered that a blessing or a curse.  I have no idea.  But after twenty-one years, the Attorney General of the United States agreed to release James.  Why?

Because he was innocent. 

His prosecutor was guilty of misconduct.  He had three convicts claim James had admitted killing his kids–testimony in exchange for reduced sentences. 

His neighbor, who had fed James’s seven children poisoned red beans and rice and had planted more poison in James’s shed, confessed to a nursing home worker that she had committed the crime.  At the time, that neighbor was on parole for killing her second husband and she was a suspect in the poisoning death of her first husband.  The jurors weren’t told any of that, and in short order James was convicted and sentenced to death by electrocution.

 His kids died in 1967.  James carried those burdens of guilt knowing he was innocent and all the abuse that came with being blamed for killing his own kids for twenty-one years before he was exonerated and released.

Twenty-one years of one bad day after another and another …

James’s story offers all of us perspective.  If, for you, it falls short, think of Jesus.  He was perfect, and yet he was wrongly accused, betrayed, arrested, beaten and crucified by a group of people He trusted, and a second group of people who feared Him because He did not fear them—and He knew all they would do before they did it.

That’s a long string of bad days.  Really bad days.

If the perfect had to endure them, then why in the world wouldn’t we? 

So we need to accept it.  We’re going to have bad days, but it is incumbent upon us to keep them in perspective.  Not to overreact or make more of a bad day than is warranted.

Granted, some are truly and completely horrific.  But most of the days we consider bad, in five years, we’ve forgotten.

There’s a lesson in that.

Blessings,

Vicki