I will start off by telling you that my inspiration for writing this post is the fact that I currently cannot breathe through my nose, I have been sneezing non-stop for the past four days, and at one point, I used at least 75 tissues within a five hour period. Glamorous, right?
No. Not at all. I feel like I could take flight at any moment due to the top half of my head feeling like a balloon.
But, here I am–trying to fight through the discomfort and fatigue and write about the good of all of this.
Huh, the good. Riiight.
Yes. Although it is hard to see (very hard), there is some good. You see, whenever I have days like this, I try my hardest to see it as an opportunity to live out a wonderful phrase that I heard someone say a couple years ago:
Happiness is a choice.
A choice? I always thought that you were either happy or…not happy. Do we really have control over that? As I dwelled on those words more and more, I came to the realization that we do, in fact, have some control over that. Now, I’m not gonna lie–there are days filled with tragedies and griefs that hit us so hard that there simply is nothing we can do about it. Our hearts can only take so much, really. And on those days, all we can do is let our sorrow loose and cling to God’s comfort to get us through the day.
But more often than we have those days, we have your normal, run-of-the-mill, just plain bad days. Like, for instance, when we get sinus infections. Not a good day. When I woke up that first morning with a stuffed up nose, a sore throat, and a head that felt like it was filled with cement, all I wanted to do was walk around all day moaning and groaning about how terrible I felt and wish that everyone else could feel my pain so that they knew just how much I deserved their pity.
As I kept wishing all of this, though, I couldn’t stop that phrase from popping into my mind. Happiness is a choice. The voice inside my head groaned and rolled it’s imaginary eyes saying, Yes, I know. But I really don’t feel like being happy right now. I’m not happy! But the more I thought about it, the more I came to the realization that I could either let my stupid nose and throat get the best of me and make everyone around me miserable as well, or I could choose to be as happy as possible and have a good day.
So out of bed I rolled, and I went through my day trying to be as normally happy as I usually am even though the skin around my nose was bright red and hurt like the dickens from using too many tissues. But just when I thought I was doing okay with this whole choosing to be happy thing…more bad stuff happens. It’s Monday morning, for one. I forget an assignment, I have my oh-so-wonderful Aunt Flo visit that very same morning, I miss a class, I run out of tissues for my nose, I have to sit through a three hour night class, AND the cafe I eat dinner at every week doesn’t have my soup! *sigh*
But amidst all of these so-called problems, I choose to be happy. Because I know there are people out there who have it way worse than me. I have the ability to choose to be happy because I am blessed more than I care to admit at times. Why should I let these small problems of mine get the best of me and make everyone around me miserable when that doesn’t need to be the case? What kind of choice is that?
This may come as a shock to you, but bad things will happen. They just will. Some will be worse than others, and as I said before, some we may not be able to manage. And that’s okay. But when we come across the ones that we are able to manage, perhaps we should remind ourselves that we have a choice in whether we will be happy despite those bad things. I will be the first one to tell you that there have definitely been times that I have chosen not to be happy, and there will probably be times in the future that I will make that choice again.
But I hope that more times than not, I will choose to be happy. Because I have the ability to do so, even when the bad things in my day threaten to take my happiness from me. I can choose happiness.
Even when they don’t have my soup.
Brianna Lee Kauffman 