Personal Log 9.10.20

Bad days. 

You know them well, those days when nothing goes right, whether it begins w/ a rough night's sleep or you wake up w/ a massive headache or everything slips out of your hands or you knock everything over & have to spend an hour cleaning up the mess…  

We all have bad days; usually it's one every few months. Some people have a couple of bad days in a row, others have bad weeks & still others have a season where whatever you put your hand to just fails, which could fall into the category of either 1) not God's will or 2) attacks from the enemy.

Last week was not a bad week for me; I was on edge because I was on call for jury duty, so I couldn't make any plans whatsoever until after 5:30 pm every evening when I had to log/call in to see my status for the next day.

I was looking forward to this being a good week but it started off w/ my cousin Shawn being killed in a road accident on Monday. I  don't have all the details but he was driving a rig & it overturned, killing him. He was a really nice guy, quiet & strong. He leaves behind a wife & five children… 

Someone will always ask the question “why?” & that's normal, it's human nature to ask that. Here's a son, a brother, a husband, a father, a cousin, a friend & he's gone, it's a massive hole left behind. 

I'm grateful for life & for my life; over the years God has saved me countless times from near-death experiences; I could have easily died in any of those circumstances but I didn't. In times like these when I lose a family member I sometimes think, “why was _____ taken? Why not me? I'm single, I have no one I'm leaving behind. If I was gone hardly anyone would notice...”

I recall the Summer of 2013 when I was sitting in a swing w/ my grandma up on her farm in South Haven; it was just the two of us & we were holding hands, just talking & she said, “Sometimes I wonder why I'm the only one left… I've outlived my folks, your grandad, all his family, one son & most all of my generation. I'm all alone, why does the Good Lord still have me here? There must be a reason.” She passed away two years later but in those two years I believe she impacted more people w/ her faith & her wisdom than she did in the previous 88 years. At 90, her work was done.

There's work for me to do & I'm trying to get it done but there's opposition, there's bad days like the past couple. The hard drive on my pc, the one that I had just laid several tracks on & previously had zero issues with as it was working perfectly, suddenly crashed: wouldn't read any usb's, file system was corrupted, would not even boot to the hard drive so I could recover the files, it was dead. Once again, time & projects lost. It keeps happening. It was late at night & I had decided to save the projects to the hard drive to transfer to a flash drive in the morning, well, I didn't know what the morning would hold… Sometimes I just want to give up, sometimes I know I cannot.

A few weeks ago I ran across a 1943 movie called Madame Curie, starring Greer Garson & Walter Pigeon, for some reason I just felt in my spirit to watch it. For years, Marie Curie & her husband Pierre spent every waking moment isolating element after element to eventually discover radium. After what they thought was the final failed experiment, a dejected Marie Curie said, “I can't give it up, I just can't. Even if it takes a hundred years I've got to see it through to the end.”

Little did I know how I needed that quote to help me in the following weeks w/ my own health challenges, w/ death & w/ discouragement from loss of time & effort. 

We all have bad days but I've come to realize that regardless of what happens here, I have a pretty good life & serve a good God. I'm simply trying to get things while I can, I've got to see it through to the end because I never know when the end will come.