Stay with me: the answer is coming. But first, I’ve been teaching my writing students that “essay” comes from the late Latin and Old French word meaning to “weigh” or “sift” or “attempt” or “put on trial.” How perfect for the work of writing anything at all! When students consider a topic to explore, it’s a weighing out, a sifting through, an attempt at meaning, and a way to put the thing on trial to test its quality.
I love essay as a verb. I’m not blogging; I’m essaying. I’m sifting through this day for meaning and beauty and for evidence of Something More. I’m putting the negative, disappointing worst of it all on trial up against the goodness and mercy of God. That’s what I do. Every day, I do this.
So this morning when one daughter asks for the secret of it all–the secret for having a good day every day, we talk about two things that took me five years and thousands of essays to understand. I’ve sifted through it all to find this:
1. You look for God’s special blessings (Psalm 31:19, Lamentations 3:22-23) that often come disguised as something you don’t like at first.
2. You look for ways to be a blessing to someone else (Isaiah 58:10).
If you do this, every day of your life, perhaps every day could indeed be good. In this model, bad days are good days, even if the special blessing God sent was that you were a blessing to someone else. (In other words, if you can’t find #1, you get it through being #2.)
But it takes a certain sifting and weighing, of attempting and putting on trial, to see the blessing. And it takes a self-abandonment and willingness to cooperate with God to act as a blessing to someone else. Both points stand up to history and to this present day when all three of us are sick with various ailments: When I look for God’s gifts, I see them. When I look to be a blessing, I am.
And the day turns into a good one because Jesus was here, and I knew it.