Difficult times (horrible days) are often God’s way of making you what He longs for you to be. Don’t pull the plug before the work is done.
In her children’s book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, Judith Viorst captures one young man’s really bad day. Alexander starts the day with gum in his hair, a sorry prize in his cereal (while his brother gets the great prize), a bad seat in the car pool, a rejection by his friends, a pitiful lunch in his bag, a trip to the dentist and lima beans for supper.
Besides his conclusion, “I think I’ll move to Australia,” Alexander punctuates every new trauma with the line: “It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” Ever have a day like that? A week…? A lifetime…? One of the variations of Murphy’s Law says: “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong and usually return. If the bottom falls out, you can rest assured that the sides will tumble down on top of you too.”
Listen to this illustration I came across:
How you can tell when it’s going to be a rotten day:
*You wake up face down on the pavement.
*You call suicide Prevention and they put you on hold.
*You see a “60 Minutes” news team waiting in your office.
*You birthday cake collapses from the weight of the candles.
*You turn on the news and they’re showing emergency routes out of the city.
*Your twin forgets your birthday.
*Your car horn goes off accidentally and remains stuck as you follow a group of Hell’s Angels on the freeway.
*Your boss tells you not to bother to take off your coat.
*The bird singing outside your window is a buzzard.
*You wake up and your braces are locked together.
*You call your answering service and they tell you it’s none of your business.
*Your income tax check bounces.
*You put both contact lenses in the same eye.
*Your wife says, “Good morning, Bill”, and your name is George.
I must share one more illustration with you:
Chippie the parakeet never saw it coming. One second he was peacefully perched in his cage. The next he was sucked in, washed up, and blown over.
The problem began when Chippie’s owner decided to clean Chippie’s cage with a vacuum cleaner. She removed the attachment from the end of the hose and stuck it in the cage. The phone rang, & she turned to pick it up. She’d barely said “hello” when “sssopp!” Chippie got sucked in.
The bird owner gasped, put down the phone, turned off the vacuum, & opened the bag. There was Chippie—still alive, but stunned.
Since the bird was covered with dust and soot, she grabbed him and raced to the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and held Chippie under the running water. Then, realizing that Chippie was soaked and shivering, she did what any compassionate bird owner would do. she reached for the hair dryer and blasted the pet with hot air.
Poor chippie never knew what hit him.
A few days after the trauma, the reporter who’d initially written about the event contacted Chippie’s owner to see how the bird was recovering. “Well,” she replied, “Chippie doesn’t sin much anymore—he just sits and stares.”
It’s hard not to see why. Sucked in, washed up, and blown over…That’s enough to steal the song from the stoutest heart.
In The eye of the Storm by Maax Lucado
In both of those illustrations it sounds like a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Ever had a day like that?
“Horrible Days” take on a myriad of shapes: A friend that is fickle…or having no friend at all. A boy/girlfriend that walks out or never walks in. A job that’s going nowhere, or a job that never materializes. A business that is failing. Your finances crumbling because of circumstances beyond your control. An illness that won’t go away, a diagnosis that scares you to death. An unexpected trip to the cemetery to leave the remains of someone you never expected to have to live without. This is the kind of stuff that makes you want to say: “Why, God?” or “Why are you always picking on me?” This is the stuff of horrible days.
Well, what do you do with terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days? Where do they fit in an eternal scheme of things? That’s exactly the question James is answering to his bewildered flock scattered to the four winds across an Asian/European continent, a flock that had been having not only a bad day, but a bad decade. They had been hated for being Jews, not they are hated for being so-called Christians. They had been ostracized from their culture, their shops had been boycotted, their families harassed in the marketplace and at school. To this bunch, their ex-pastor writes a letter [to the dispersed] calling himself “a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.” This book is likely a “memo” sent to his scattered flock after word came back to him concerning the problems they were facing—the horrible lives they were apparently experiencing, and the resulting questions about how all this fit in to God’s scheme of things. Pastor James is going to tell them (and us) where to file these things called “trials”.
What Horrible Days ARE [James 1:2]
The first thing we notice is that they are coming. Notice James says, “when you fall into various trials.”
These are trials or afflictions, not self-made or sin-made messes. This not breaking the law and going to jail, not cheating and getting expelled, not a conscious defiance of something God has addressed as wrong—morally, spiritually, or sexually.
These trials are God-allowed struggles upon you that are not of your own doing, and not within your power to start or stop. You didn’t bring it upon yourself. In verse 3, “testing” does not mean to show or make someone fail, but rather a test to prove genuineness, to show excellence. And it’s not showing something to God, but to (1) Ourselves—not to break you, but to show you what you’re made of, and to (2) Others—to show them what we’re made of. It’s like the “Inspected By” stickers in clothes and on appliances. It’s there to show that what you believe is the real thing has been proven to be the real thing.
There are “many kinds” of trials. I don’t know what yours is shaped like. But if you are there today, you are probably wanting some insights into the point of it all.
Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days are guaranteed by God and are there to show ourselves and others what we’re really made of. So what do they do for us?
What Horrible Days Do [James 1:3-4]
They make us STRONG. “Perseverance” literally means, “to stay under.” This is the picture of a huge Olympian “remaining under” the barbell weighing hundreds of pounds. He stays under it. It is endurance, steadfastness, and staying power. It is that permanent and underlying active trait of the soul from which endurance springs.
Tuff stuff and horrible days are often sent into our lives to build staying power and durability. As you survive the testing of your “equipment,” you begin to see some of the capacities that God has given you. Difficult days are often God’s way of making us into what He wants us to be.
There is a second part to the value of “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” They make us GROW [James 1:4]. Perseverance has work to do. Trials, in some sense, test the weak parts of our armor, help us find it, grow in that area, and thus become a more useful vessel to God in that particular area.
Guston Borgluym was the sculptor who carved the massive figures of four American presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt—on Mt. Rushmore.
When asked how he produced the amazing work, he replied, “Those figures were there for 40 million years. All I had to do was dynamite 400,000 tons of granite to bring them into view.” So Christ shapes our lives, chipping away those things that must go and replacing them with character that honors Him.
Are you finding some areas of “holes and gaps” in your life? That’s the reason for a trial. It is there to show ourselves and others what we’re really made of.
Well, what do we do with these terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days? Listen to James.
Four Keys For Turning A TEST Into A TRIUMPH
Look at the character or nature of your horror. If it’s your doing, the first step is confession, then repentance (sorry enough to change.) This means getting on the same page with God and asking Him to help you make it His growing; device not your sinful consequence.
Allow your trial to do its “thing.” Verse 4 – “But let patience [endurance] have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.”
The word “perfect” means: “brought to its end, finished, wanting nothing necessary to completeness.”
The word “complete” or “entire” means: “complete in all its parts, in no part wanting or unsound, complete, entire, whole. It is used of a body without blemish or defect. It means to be complete in all respects.”
So quit fighting your trial. Let your trial/terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day do the thing it was designed to do—to bring you to perfection, lacking nothing. It is designed to make you the person you and God want you to be. Because none of us are perfect yet you can still expect terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days. Don’t pull the plug on God’s growth device. James is telling us to make the decision whether we will let perseverance do its intended work. It means to come to God & tell Him: “Go for it God. Make me what You want me to be—what I want me to be.”
Find where God may want you to GROW. God is making you what you really want to be: a characteristic that He is working on (which muscle group) or, maybe, that part of you that’s missing that He wants to develop.
File it under O.K. In verse 3 James says “knowing this” or “consider.” That means count it that way. File it there. Think through your terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, your trial. God is making you what you long to be. James is not telling us to be silly, syrupy, saccharin saints who say, “How blessed I am with this cancer, this bankruptcy, this divorce, this bill from the funeral home…” No, not that. But rather, think through it, get it in its proper perspective, in God’s perspective. File it under joy, not fake or surface joy, but pure joy, the joy of becoming what you want to be.
Conclusion
Has your day, week or life been a series of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad incidents? If they are not of your own making, they could be the hand of a loving but persistent Father, making you what you long to be. Let happen, learn from it, find where He wants you to grow. File it under O.K. In a piece called “Crossings,” Lee Webber writes: [Guideposts May 1986, cited in Parables, Etc., November 1986, Vol. 6, 3]
I came to the swift, raging river,
And the roar held the echo of fear;
Oh Lord, give me wings to fly over,
If you are, as You promised, quite near.
But he said, Trust the grace I am giving,
All-pervasive, sufficient for you.
Take My hand—we will face this together.
For My plan is not over, but through.
For many of us facing the swift, raging river, the way is not over, but through. Won’t you let God do what He’s trying to do in you in the crossing? He’s making you into what you want to be.
