When People Let You Down

Last week, Spanish class was awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome, not so hot. My students made me want to weep with their success on more than one occasion. They really made some great advancements. Then came Friday and what I thought was going to be a super easy matching vocab test, but they didn’t impress me so much.

“Oh man, we have a test today?” said two of my guys in a panic. (Picture me giving them the stink eye.)

So I came home all slumpy shoulders.

“How was your day?” Matt asked.

“OK,” I said. (Slump.)

“Just OK?” he said, which I heard as, “Go ahead and tell me every minute detail about your day and what has you all droopy because my entire existence has meaning when I hear about your life.”

I told him about the test and how I was hoping for better.

“You should probably allow them an off day,” he said. “We all have an off day.”

That changed my entire perspective. My students had been working with excellence all week, but they were tired coming into Friday. Maybe they should get a chance not to be perfect sometimes.

And so I bring you to the good news for all of us:

“It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed; His compassions do not fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness” (Lam. 3:22-23).

What I hear in this verse is that the Lord allows us to have an off day. All is not lost—we find Him faithfully there waiting for us the next morning.

He is merciful (that is, withholding the stink eye).

He loves us. We are more than a project to complete; we are His children.

Thank the Lord He is helping us work toward perfection but doesn’t expect us to hit the mark every second of the day.

This best news goes up and down the line. For us it means we are allowed to have one of those days where we feel like we have dropped the ball every time we’ve turned around.

For our people, it means we should be generous toward them. When our husband or our sister or our kids or our boss has an off day, we can practice giving the same treatment we’re receiving fresh from the Lord every morning. We can offer faith and love and mercy.

And you know what our people will do when we let them off the hook for once? They’ll sigh—the way we girls sigh when we take off the constricting tights that we wore at work all day. You know what I mean.