I always thought it was weird when friends would tell me that their day was ruined, that they were having a no good very bad day. Days aren’t good or bad, and they can be turned around at any moment. Yielding to God is the way to turn any day around. I’ve had my kids yelling and pushing each other and complaining and screaming, and we stop what we are doing. We ask God to help us walk by His Spirit instead of by the flesh. At every moment, there is something that God would want you to be doing. Yield to God to find out what it is.
This bad day happened to be a Sunday when we were about to back out our driveway to go to church. Our car wouldn’t start. I looked at the despair in my husband’s face, and I felt it, too. We had no money to get the car fixed. We had just spent $800 to get the two cars fixed (the little car wasn’t big enough for our whole family to go to church). My husband told the kids to get out of the car. He opened the hood and sighed. This is not what he had planned to do on a Sunday morning.
As I went up the stairs with the children, I remembered one night when my parents were watching the children, and my husband and I were on a date. I had left my cell phone in the car. I told my husband I wanted to go back to the car to get my phone because the phone was worth more than the car. He laughed. This was an insult to the car, not a compliment to the phone. I said, “I hope someone steals our car, because it would serve him right.” My husband laughed again. “Our car is worth less than what it costs to repair it, so it might as well just be smashed to smithereens.”
“Why can’t I have a car that works?” I heard my husband say when I walked up the stairs that Sunday morning. I told the kids to go to the living room. I asked God what I should do with them, and it occurred to me to do Bible sword drills. Even though my kids knew the books of the Bible by heart, they never found the Bible passages in time for when the pastor read them. My husband told me that I needed to do Bible sword drills with the kids, and I agreed, but we never seemed to have the time to do it.
I had my kids get their Bibles, and I started by reviewing the books of the Bible. Then I had the kids open to the middle of their Bibles. Some of their Bibles landed in Psalms, others in Isaiah. I told them that the Old Testament books before Psalms were to the left, and the books after Psalms were to the right, including the New Testament. I told them to open to the middle, then try to find the beginning of Matthew. Hold that chunk in your hand. Feel how thick the chunk of pages is between Psalms and the New Testament. Now find the book of Judges. Find the book of Jude. That is Revelation, scoot back a page.
The Old Testament minor prophets are so small that you have to flip more slowly in that area. Same with the epistles of the New Testament. I called out many different Scriptures, and the children were quicker in finding the passages. After spending one hour in Bible sword drills, my kids knew their way around the Bible. “See?” I said to my husband. “God always has a reason for the calamities that come our way. It’s good that the car broke down, because now the children know how to find their way around the Bible.”
