Bad Day

Scripture:  Acts 16:16-34

Murphy’s law, named after rocket engineer Edward Murphy Jr, states “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Now technically, this is not a scientific law it is a somewhat pessimistic adage.  But If you have lived enough life, chances are you have a day that went so badly that it felt like an experiment to prove just how true Murphy’s law is.   From time to time we all have bad days, and when I have a bad day I remind myself that it could be worse.  I think that tends to be true for most of us, but that probably was not true for Tsutomu Yamaguchi.  He worked as a marine engineer for Mitsubishi in Japan during World War II.  In the summer of 1945, he had spent several months away from home on an extended business trip to work on the design for an oil tanker.   He had finished his work and was set to go home on August 6th, 1945.  Unfortunately, for Yamaguchi the city he was leaving was Hiroshima.  He was two miles from ground zero of the atomic blast, and he managed to take cover in a ditch which likely saved his life.   Despite surviving, he did suffer severe burns.   He had to walk through the destroyed city, and against all odds found a train station still operating.  Even better for Yamaguchi, one of the destinations this train was heading towards was home.  Tsutomu Yamaguchi stepped off the train in his hometown of Nagasaki.   He was at a hospital being treated for his injuries when the second atomic bomb dropped.   Fortunately, he survived that one too making him the only person to live through two atomic blasts.   Fortunately for me, I have never had a day that bad. 

It can be helpful for me to remind myself it could be worse, but it is also helpful to remind myself having a bad day is not a competition.   Just because someone might have it worse, it does not negate how we feel.  We are all allowed to have bad days.  There are a lot of reasons why we can feel down and why we can have bad days.  Life can be hard.  It can be full of setbacks, mishaps, and darkness.  Sometimes all of this culminates in creating a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.   This morning’s scripture comes from one of Paul’s bad days.  It was a day where things seemed to keep going from bad to worse.  How Paul and Silas reacted to having a terrible day can give us guidance for when it has not been your day, your week, your month, or even your year.

This morning’s scripture takes place during Paul’s second missionary journey.  He is in the city of Philippi, and it would be hard to come up with a worse day than Paul had.  The whole thing got off to a rocky start.   For days, this girl with a spirit possessing her, had been an annoyance for Paul and his companions.  It seemed that Paul was willing to leave well enough alone.  Yes, this girl was troubled by a spirit, and she was suffering the injustice of slavery, but it seemed Paul was going to let those issues be while he focused on other matters.  However, the girl’s constant shouting at them troubled Paul to the point that he did something about it and cast the spirit out. 

 This is a point I think we can all relate to Paul.  Because while we may never had a possessed girl following us around shouting at us nonstop, we have all been in situations where we let little annoyances get to us.  We have all been in  situations where all of the little things add up, and something that should have not been that big of a deal pushes us over the edge.  We end up exploding at something silly or we shut down, ugly crying over something that should have been nothing.  Like Paul, we have all been there.  Unfortunately, for Paul the fallout of his actions led to his day getting worse. 

Casting out the Sprit was a good and right thing, especially for the afflicted girl.  For Paul it seems no good deed goes unpunished, because others did not see this way.  This morning’s scripture explains how a whole crowd got whipped up against Paul.  One thing led to another and spiraled out of control until they were arrested and as the scripture states, “the magistrate ordered them to be stripped and beaten.”   There is a lot of pain implied in that sentence.    Roman flogging used a small whip that consisted of multiple lashes attached to one crop, and these lashes often had small pieces of metal, glass, or shell imbedded in them.  These extra bits made the whips, exceptionally effective at tearing the skin.   This was a punishment that the Roman empire did not inflict upon their citizens but saved it for non-citizens.  There was no standard to how this punishment was administered, so we do not know how badly Paul and Silas were beaten in this scripture.  The intention of flogging was not to kill, but Roman writers referred to flogging as “the half death.”   It was not uncommon for people to survive the punishment but die in the aftermath from a combination of physical shock, blood loss, or infection.   While the scripture does not dwell on the gruesome details, Paul received much more than a slap on the wrist, and he certainly bore the scars from that day for the rest of his life. 

After all of that, Paul and Silas are then thrown into prison and while they are there an earthquake hits.  Of course, from there things do turn around for Paul and Silas.  However, it is fair to say that being beaten, ending up in prison and then being released via earthquake is probably not how Paul and Silas saw their day going.  It was, by any objective measure, a bad day.   While hopefully very few of us have days that bad, we have all had days that we ended up wishing we never got out of bed for.  We have days where nothing seems to go right.   We may never have experienced being flogged like Paul did, but we all have days that hurt.  A lot.  We all have days that have left scars, even if the scars are not physical.   Like Paul we have all had bad days, which is why we can learn from how Paul responded.  Specifically, there are two things we can learn about what to do when we have a bad day.  

 We find Paul’s response to having such a terrible day in verse 25: “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God.”  Despite all that Paul had been through he was still praising God.  And why shouldn’t he?   If God is worth praising when things are going well then God is worth praising when we have a bad day.  We should praise God in the storm, because God does not change.  What makes God worthy of our praise is always the same.  This is not to say that we have to make sure we always stay on the sunny side of life.  Praising God amid bad days, is not forced positivity for the sake of positivity.   We can still feel what we feel.  We can still have bad days and feel sad, angry, or hurt.   Yet, It is always appropriate to praise God, even if we do so through the tears, even if we do so with clenched fist, and even if all we can manage is a whisper.

When we have a bad day, or when we are in the middle of a string of bad days, we can follow Paul’s lead here and we can praise God.  We should do this because it is always good and right to praise God.  Doing so, will not magically make our day better but it will remind us that this bad day is not everything.  Praising God will remind us that there is only rainbow after a storm, and that dawn only follows the darkest part of night.  

Paul praise God, but he does not stop there.   The other thing that Paul does during a bad day, in addition to praising God, was being open to be used by God to be a blessing to others.  Paul and Silas were not the only ones who had a bad day in this morning’s scripture.  The unnamed jail keeper also ended up having a bad day.  Verse 23 states that after Paul and Silas were thrown into prison the jailer was “commanded to guard them carefully.”   After the earthquake caused the doors of the jail to open and the chains to fall off the prisoners, this man was going to literally fall on his own sword because he thought death was his best possible outcome from this.   Yet, Paul somehow managed to get all of the prisoners to stay put.  This jailer had been moments from death, and in response to learning that his worst fears had not happened, we can read verse 29 of this morning’s scripture: “The jailer called for lights, rushed in and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. He then brought them out and asked “Sirs what must I do to be saved?” 

 Despite being harassed, arrested, beaten, and thrown into prison Paul was still open to the spirit’s leading and because of that the jailer and his whole family were saved.   We can learn from Paul’s openness here.  When things are not going our way, and we have a bad day, we tend to get very insular and focus with tunnel vision on ourselves.  Yet, we can still be used by God even when we are not at 100%.  Even when we are down or frustrated, or things just are not going our way God can still use us to be a blessing to others.   Even if we ourselves are not having the best of days, we can still be a blessing to someone else who might be going through their own bad day. 
 
I know this is the case, because on one especially bad day I once had there was a stranger who was an amazing blessing to us.  This bad day was right at twenty two years ago.   Abigal and I had been married for less than a week.  For a honeymoon we spent a few days in the Smokey Mountains outside of Gatlinburg.  The trouble started as we began to head home.   I did not know a lot about cars, and I still do not know a lot about cars, but I knew the noise the car was making was really, really not right. I knew engines were not supposed to rev that high while going that slow.   This was in the era before smart phones so it was not like we could just look up where the closest mechanic was.  In Maryville, TN we happened to spot a mechanic’s garage and we pulled in.  We showed up in the middle of the day with a busted car at a busy mechanics shop, and after explaining our situation they immediately looked at the car.   The transmission was shot and for the car to make the journey back to Indiana it would have to be replaced.   Even though we were not on the schedule for the day this shop made us a priority.  They called local junkyards, found a transmission, and sent someone to get it.   From the time they left to get the part to the time they were done was just over three hours.   They truly made our car the priority to get done.   They replaced our car’s entire transmission for $700.  At the time that seemed like so much money, but in hindsight I now know they charged us for the part at cost.   We were only twenty-two, we had only graduated college two weeks prior, we were over 300 miles from home, and the only directions we had were on a printed piece of paper from MapQuest, and we were in a car that had something deeply wrong with it.  It was a bad day, but some incredibly kind mechanics took pity on some newlywed kids. 

 Yet, it was not just good luck on our part.  Years later, after smart phones and google became a thing, I used the Internet to track down that mechanic’s shop.  On their website it stated that they are a proud Christian owned business.  We avoided what could have been a terrible, horrible, no good, really bad day because followers of Jesus showed Christlike mercy and kindness on us.  If we have eyes to see how and where the Spirit is leading us, then we too can be a blessing to someone else.  We can be someone else’s answer to prayer.  Even if we are amid our own stuff, God can use us to be the remedy for someone else’s bad day.  
 
Paul had a bad day, but he praised God anyway.  He had a bad day, but he was open to the Spirit’s leading.  May we seek to learn from this.  If you hre having a bad day or a bad week, or even a bad month.  Then I’m sorry you are going through this.  Remember, it is a bad day not a bad life.   It will get better, and I can promise you that throughout it all God will be there every step of the way.   So may we praise God from who all blessing flow.   May we seek to be a blessing for someone else so that they may be filled with joy.