It Went Wrong By Eleven

The car park was the first thing. Then the queue. Then somebody said they were hungry in the tone that means something else.

And by about eleven o'clock you knew. You were standing somewhere holding a bag, doing sums about what the day had cost, watching one of them cry about something that was not the thing they were crying about, and there was a sentence in your head that said: this is a write off.

You did not say it out loud. But you spent the rest of the day performing an outing you had privately canceled.

And you have carried it since. Not heavily, but it is in there, filed under times we tried and it did not work, which is a folder that gets a little bit heavier every time something goes in it and eventually stops you booking anything.

I want to do two things with that day, and one of them is to laugh at it, because most of it was funny and you are not allowed to see that yet.

But the first thing is this. Nobody should have handled it better.

Not you. There is no version of that morning where a more competent parent gets a different outcome, because the queue was long, the child was tired, and the weather did what it did. You were not failing at something everybody else can do. You were standing in a car park with your family while a series of ordinary things went wrong at once.

All things work together for good

There is a sentence in Romans that gets said badly at people constantly, and it is worth reading for what it does not say.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28, King James Version)

All things work together for good.

Now, what it does not say. It does not say all things are good. It does not say a bad day was secretly a good day. And it does not say that you should have enjoyed the car park, or that the tears at eleven were fine really.

Work together is the phrase, and it describes a process happening across a long stretch, in which things that are genuinely bad in themselves are being taken up into something that ends well.

That is not a reframe. Nobody in that sentence is being asked to feel differently about the thing while it happens. It is a claim about where all of it is going, made to people who at the time were having a much worse day than yours.

So the day was bad. Say it plainly. And it is not lost, because nothing in your family is being wasted, and the sorting out of that is not your job and never was.

You are not required to call a bad day good, and heaven has never once asked you to reframe it while standing in it. Romans 8:28 says the things work together rather than that the things are good, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that honest instead of a platitude.

What actually happened that day

Here is the practical part, and it is a question rather than an instruction.

What actually happened on that day, apart from the bit that went wrong?

Because I suspect you cannot answer immediately, and that is not because nothing else happened. It is because the whole day got filed under its worst hour, and the rest of it went into the file with it, unexamined.

Somewhere in that day there was a thing one of them said in the queue. There was the moment in the car when everybody was quiet and it was not a bad quiet. There was whatever your youngest did with the receipt. There was the point where the whole thing had collapsed so completely that one of you laughed.

Those are not consolation prizes and they are not you looking on the bright side. They are things that happened, on that day, that you have not counted, because you audited the day by its worst hour and closed the books.

And children, notoriously, file it completely differently. Ask a nine year old about the day it rained and everything shut, and you will get an account of a day out. They were not doing your arithmetic. They were with you somewhere.

You are able to count what else happened, and it has never once been looking on the bright side to include the rest of the day. The written word describes a long process rather than a good moment, and the Spirit of God is the one who reopens a day that a person closed the books on.

Tell one story out loud

So here is the assignment, and it is the best one on this site.

Tell one story from the worst day, out loud, at dinner.

Not the lesson. Not what you would do differently. The story: the bit where the machine ate the ticket, the bit where somebody was sick in the exact worst place, the point at which you looked at each other over the top of a crying child in a bus shelter.

Tell it like a story. That means the details, in order, with the funny part landing.

Two things happen and I have seen both. The first is that the children join in, because they have their own version and theirs is usually better and it will not match yours at all. The second is that the day changes category while you are talking. A disaster told badly is a failure. A disaster told well is a family story, and family stories are where a family keeps what it is.

Romans 8:28 has the things working together across time rather than in the moment, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present at a table while a bad day becomes something the family owns.

You are able to tell it rather than carry it, and it has never once needed a lesson attached to be worth telling. Romans 8:28 puts the working together in the whole rather than the hour, and the Spirit of God is the one who is at the table while you laugh about it.