Today was a bad day! from Paul Mathis

Thank you, thank you Paul for pinch hitting this week. Today is the first day I have not felt like $#@~!!!. Paul has some wisdom for "Bad Days"

Some days, I just want it to stop.

I don’t want to have to keep putting in so much effort.

Life is hard and I don’t always think I am up to the challenge.

Some mornings, it is such an effort to get out of bed because I know I am just going to have the face the same challenges I faced yesterday. If I have already worked so hard, why do I have to keep working? If I have put so much effort into this already, why can’t I see a payoff?

And I don’t always feel like I can tell anyone.

Because, after all, I’m the guy with sobriety time. I’m the guy who leads recovery groups. I’m the guy who’s almost 40, married 17 years with 3 kids. I’m the guy who helps teach people how to discover their talents and abilities and find work. I’m the guy who leads small groups for middle schoolers, high schoolers, and adults.

So who can I tell?

I can’t show any weakness. I need to be strong. And also, won’t all these things just go away if only I have enough faith? Pray hard enough? Do more churchy stuff?

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One of the worst things about feeling that way is that we convince ourselves we cannot talk about it.

Feeling tired, feeling overwhelmed, feeling depressed is not strange. It is not sinful. It is not wrong. It happens.

And pretending it doesn’t makes it worse.

We need to create more space to talk about our difficult days. The more we talk, the less strange it seems. More than that, when we talk about it more, we realize that we are not alone in our struggle. So many of us have thought we are the only ones who feel depressed, lonely, anxious, or just sad.

But we are not. So many others have experienced the same things. When we isolate, our experience only gets worse. And isolating does something else: it allows us to convince ourselves that we are the only ones who struggle. Because when everyone is isolating, no one is sharing.

One of the most powerful, startling, and profound realizations anyone can have is, “I am not alone.” I find out I am not alone when someone has the courage to speak up and say they go through the same things I go through. Other people find out they are not alone when I muster up enough courage to speak up on my own behalf.

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Treating it like sin or weakness makes it worse.