Nathaniel and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Ever have one of those days where everything seems to go wrong? Where nothing works out the way you thought it should, and no matter how hard you try to fix it, you only seem to make it worse? Maybe it’s not a string of things going wrong, but just one really big important thing that went wrong? 

Over the last year, I have had more bad days than I care to admit. But right now, I want to focus on two very specific bad days and how they turned out very different from one another. The first was a day in late July, and to explain it, a bit of backstory is in order.

The last week of July was one of the toughest weeks I had ever had. The three months leading up to that week had been a whirlwind of ups and downs. My life and my marriage had been turned upside down and torn apart.  I was doing everything I could to pick up the pieces. There were precious few good days.

We were going to counseling. I was praying harder than I ever had before. I had made sacrifices in every area of my life, all to save and redeem my marriage. We were at the breaking point. A fork in the road that would set our marriage on either the path to redemption or destruction. In my heart, I knew that I wanted the path to redemption, but I wasn’t the only one who had a choice in the matter. 

There is a phrase I have heard throughout my life: Actions speak louder than words. It’s a very simple expression with a deep and complicated meaning. And it became all too real for me at the end of my marriage. You see, I desperately wanted to believe the words I was hearing, but the actions didn’t match up. I couldn’t reconcile the two, and the conflict between them was tearing me apart. 

I needed to know if I should trust the words or the actions. I needed to know once and for all if she wanted our marriage to work. In what would become our last counseling session, I decided to put all my cards on the table. I drew a proverbial line in the sand.

I laid out in detail all the mixed signals and conflicting behavior I was getting. How her words had proclaimed a desire to save our marriage, but her actions told the opposite story.  I was honest about the pain it was causing me and how our relationship wasn’t going to work if something didn’t change. And then, I asked her to make a decision.

Fight for our marriage, or choose to go her own way.

I was clear that if she chose me, I would continue to give everything I had towards repairing our marriage. But she would need to do the same. She would have to completely let go of the things that were holding her back. This was an all or nothing deal. And it was time to decide.

There’s always a pause while the jury goes out to consider their verdict. This decision was no different. We needed time and space apart to figure this out.

So I found myself spending the next several days staying with a friend and his family. They were amazingly gracious to me. I was an emotional wreck, and my unexpected stay had to be an inconvenience to them. But they never acted like it. They were warm and welcoming and made me feel loved at a time when I really needed it. They treated me like family.

One of the afternoons that I was at their house, we ended up watching a movie with their kids. The movie was: “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.” In the movie, Alexander seems to have the worst luck. Nothing goes his way, and his family is all so wrapped up in their own problems that they ignore him and each other. So Alexander makes a birthday wish that his family would all have a bad day so they could know what it felt like to be him. The next day, he gets his wish. Each member of his family has their own really bad day through a series of comic mishaps. In the end, the family bonds over the bad day. They help each other and it reminds them of what is really important.

It was a surprisingly funny movie. But as we watched it, I found myself thinking about my own bad days over the last few months. Unlike Alexander, I didn’t want to wish them on anyone. I didn’t ever want anyone else to feel how I did. About halfway through the movie, I got a text. It was my wife asking if I could meet her the next night to talk. I was very nervous about the talk, but hopeful too. I still believed we could work it out and I wasn’t ready to let that hope go.

I woke the next morning believing that it could be the day that everything started to turn around. I believed that it was going to be not only a good day but a great day. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out the way I hoped, and that talk would prove to be the end of our marriage.

And so on July 31st, 2018, I found myself having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. My marriage was over.

Technically, the marriage wasn’t completely over until the divorce became final in early November. But for all intents and purposes, July 31st was the day it ended for me. I gave up any hope I had that night. I had to let it go, and it was the single hardest night of my life.

In the months since then, God has been working a miracle in my heart. I know I have come a long way. Even so, there are things that come up from time to time that remind me of what happened and try to reopen those wounds. There was a pretty major one a couple of weeks ago, which leads me to the second day I wanted to share about in this story.

January 5th.

It should have been our wedding anniversary, and it would have marked 11 years.

As that day approached, I found myself filled with dread. It should have been a day of celebration, but I was afraid that it would be a day of nothing but grief and sorrow. I was afraid that the healing God had done in my heart would be undone by the pain of what that day should have been. And to make matters worse, it seemed likely that I would have to spend the whole day alone. I believed that January 5th was going to be another very bad day indeed.

I am happy to report that I was very wrong.

I ended up spending the bulk of that day with two friends. One of them has some land with an old, fallen down barn on it. He and his wife want to build a house where the barn is now, so they need it cleared off. At the same time, there is a lot of great lumber left in the remains of the barn. The three of us made a plan to salvage the useable lumber from the barn and to use it to build custom farmhouse tables for ourselves. And it worked out that January 5th was the perfect day for us to start on that project. 

The day was remarkably warm and pleasant for January. So the three of us headed up to his land and began the process of salvaging the wood. I admit that I was a bit unprepared for how difficult the work was going to be. I had pictured neatly stacked piles of 2x4s. I imagined that we would be sorting through it and picking out the best pieces. It’s okay, you can laugh at how naive I was about it. 

The barn had mostly fallen in on itself, and there were only a few beams and posts holding it together. We had to find a section of the barn where we could remove wood and not cause the rest of the barn to collapse even further. Then we needed to remove all the nails from the pieces we salvaged. Whoever built the barn had clearly intended for it to remain intact; they used a crazy amount of nails in it and these were not your average nails. Some of them were huge and very difficult to remove. 

The previous few days had been rainy, so the ground around the barn was muddy and the wood was still damp. We needed a place to store the wood so it could dry out. There was a second, smaller barn on the property, so we carried the lumber there by hand.

Even though the work was physically demanding, it felt refreshing to do. It completely took my mind off what the day should have been. We spent a huge chunk of the day there working and laughing together. In the end, we barely made a difference in cleaning up the fallen barn, but it had made a huge difference in my heart. 

Helping my friend start the work on clearing his barn felt uplifting. My own burdens became lighter as I helped him carry his. In the Bible, we are told to carry each other’s burdens. I think I understand that verse better now. It is as much for our own sake as it is for the person we are helping. It often gets our focus off of our own mess and draws us closer to God and to each other. It’s what changes a friend into a brother. 

Near the end of that day, I found myself thinking back to July 31st. It had been a day that I thought was going to be good but ended badly. And yet January 5th had so much potential to be bad, but ended up being good. 

As I stood there on his farm thinking about how different those two days were, I realized something. In a way, working to reclaim the wood and build something new from it, turned out to be very symbolic for me. During all those bad days I had, I felt like a total wreck. My life had collapsed in on itself, much like that barn. But God has been working too. He has been reclaiming the broken pieces of my life, refining them, and turning them into something new. God has a habit of restoring broken things. He looks past our mess and sees the fixer-upper hiding inside. And trust me, Chip and Jo have nothing on Jesus. 

 “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”

Galatians 6:2

 “And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm, and steadfast.”

1 Peter 5:10