A Terrible Day Showed Me How Blessed I Am

Today was the worse day of the semester. I was woken up at 8:56am by my cell phone. Normally I turn my cell on silent so that I’m not disturbed by any calls. But for some odd reason my phone started beeping at me … LOUD. Because this was so unusual I picked it up and saw that I had missed five calls and had two voicemails. The calls were all from Starbucks, so I knew something was wrong. I called my store straight away. The shift supervisor, James, picked up. He kindly explained to me that I was an hour late to work. Immediately I knew what had happened: the night before I stopped by the store to check what time I was working the following day. I read 8-12, and interpreted it to mean 8pm-midnight when in reality it was 8am-noon. Oh boy had I made a careless mistake! It is understandable why I interpreted it the way I did because I never ever work from 8am-noon. I either open or close. It is uber rare for me to work in the AM as a non-opener. Nevertheless, I felt HORRIBLE. As you can imagine, the moment I hung up the phone I was frantically getting dressed (no shower, no shave, no hair – I looked like a mess).

Then it happened. As I was about to walk out the door I noticed that my bathroom was flooded! For a moment (a brief moment) I considered whether I should let the floor get damaged and let the apartment management fix it with a property claim and get to work sooner, OOOR, if I should quickly dry it up and then get to work making myself even later. I decided to quickly dry it up – and now all of our towels are waiting to be washed, oy. I honestly could not believe how my morning was turning out.

So I rushed over to work, sped a little, and made it there fairly quickly.

There was a line from the moment I walked in until about 10:30am, the dishes were overflowing out of the sinks, hardly any of the prep had been done - which means it was a busy morning. Again, I felt terrible. I repeatedly apologized to James, my shift supervisor, and to my fellow Barista, Mike. Both were incredibly gracious towards me. James said up front, “Don’t worry about it bro. Everyone knows you have integrity. We understand that it happens sometimes.” That meant the world to me. I was a little disoriented throughout my shift, but it was doable.

I flew home to clean up my mess in the bathroom before work at American Family. I called my mom to ask if I could be a few minutes late. She could tell I was a little stressed, and offered to give me the afternoon off! I ended up going into AmFam anyways because I hate to miss work.

But the thing I realized today is how blessed I am. God has placed some truly amazing people in my life. Without every one of my partners at Bucks today, and my mom at AmFam, I don’t know how I could have made it. Of course through it all, I knew that this was all a part of God’s foreordained plan. God ordained these difficulties today, and it is for my benefit.

It is turning out to be not such a bad day after all. God has been so merciful to me, a sinner.
Rusty