You had a bad day...

"...you had a bad day....you're taking one down...you sing a sad song....." lalalala la.

This morning I was wondering about how my day was going to go when I hurried out the door late for work and the car alarm told me the gas tank was --empty-- (thank you, son). I made it to the gas station on fumes, put 20 bucks worth in at $1.24 a litre and arrived at work 15 minutes late.

I turned on my computer but although the monitor was on, the screen remained black. I crawled around under my desk ensuring everything was plugged in, then checked all the connections at the back of the computer. Everything looked fine. I turned the power bar off and on and it started up...and then hung there. I repeated this process about 5 times. After a 30 minute wait for IT help, they replaced my computer with a junky one that is used for training but takes forever to load anything. They booted it and it hung so long on one screen that I went for breakfast early and came back and nothing had changed. And so, they replaced that computer with yet another and after having waited 2 hours I was finally up and running again.... although I had no idea where my prints were going as we have several printers around the office. I got plenty of exercise today visiting printers.

Later in the day, we were warned that police would be visiting our facilities because an unhappy individual had threatened to come in shortly with a 10 gauge shotgun. Mmmhmm. All in a day's work. Luckily, he appeared to be all talk and no action.

Well, that wasn't a definition of a bad day - that's as bad as it got. That was just a day with annoyances. Perhaps a bad day or week might be when your kids have chicken pox - I've done the time on that one!

But lately I've been reading stories of the urban poor, and kids across the world whose mothers were brutally murdered before their eyes, and a devastating cyclone where a young boy watched his father swept away from him, and an earthquake wreaking havoc in peaceful neighbourhoods, tornadoes, and stories of bloody wars, and we know this list goes on forever of untold tragedies we have never experienced.

I don't quite know what to do with all this information. The world is so lopsided. I think of it every single night when I lay my head on my pillow and ask God why am I so blessed? Why should I have so much comfort at my disposal when so much of the world suffers tragedy almost too great to bear? What can I do to help? As I go to sleep praying for children I've never met who have no other mother to care about them, I pray that I will find answers to ways to help. To know to do right and not do it is wrong. And to care for people's needs is what God requires of us.

And I'm thinking I have no idea what a bad day is.